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SCRIPTURE PROVERBS, 
I-IIustratrfc, Snnotateti, anti Sppltrti 



Scripture proverbs, 

ILLUSTRATED, 
ANNOTATED, AND APPLIED. 



BY 

/ 

FRANCIS JACOX, 

AUTHOR OF 
'AT NIGHTFALL AND MIDNIGHT,' 'TRAITS OF CHARACTER,* ETC. 



Kcu rtfes ZXeyow Tt b.v QtXoi 6 airepfioXdyos ovros Xeyav ; (And some said, 
What will this babbler [seed-picker, grain-gatherer] say?)— Acts xvii. iS. 

Kal elwev avroh' 'TfteiS otoare tov avopa ko.1 rqv ddoXeaxiav avrou' (And 
he said unto them, Ye know the man and his communication). — 2 KINGS 
ix. i j (l.XX.). 



IJtfo yorh: 

T. W IIITTAKER 
N... 2, BIBLE HOUSE. 




UDCCCLXXVI. 






-?1 



^ 



LC Control Number 




tmp96 031543 



PREFACE. 



^HE title at first thought of for this book 
-*• was Scriptui'e Saws and Modem Instances. 
But ' modern ' no longer has the same meaning 
as in Shakspeare's time ; and ' saws,' however 
good an old word in itself, might to some ap- 
pear to smack of levity as applied to holy writ. 
So the present title was fixed upon, instead. 

Proverbs, in a precisely denned sense, or at least 
in the commonly accepted and approved sense, 
perhaps only a spare and sparse minority of the 
texts in this volume can properly be called. But 
the same thing may virtually be said of a large 
part of the canonical Book of Proverbs itself, and 
from it most of them are taken. The first two 
chapters are concerned with examples of the 
popular saw or adage, cited in Scripture as such ; 
the third, on Heaviness for a Night, treats of a 
: which, though not in form or design a pro- 
verb, may be regarded as one in all practical effect 



PREFACE. 



and usage ; and so of other texts, here consigned 
to the same category, because expressed with a 
terse emphasis which makes them, while retaining 
their native stamp of sacred dignity, familiar in 
our mouths as household words. 

The plan adopted in these pages is identical 
with that pursued in the compiler's previous vo- 
lumes. A text is taken, and in the illustrations, 
annotations, and applications which he proceeds 
to accumulate upon it and around it, (or, as the 
Dunciad might suggest, about it and about it,) 
he allows himself such latitude as sometimes seem- 
ingly to get out of his latitude altogether ; such 
longitude as may be got out of that term, rather 
as a graphical than a geographical expression. 

As to what there may discoverably or conjectur- 
ally be of his own in this volume, as in foregoing 
ones, the proportion of that to borrowed capital is 
so infinitesimally small, that, on the score alike of 
quantity and of quality, for all practical purposes, 
whether of credit or debit, in the writer's balance 
of accounts, it had best be ignored altogether. 

The (T7T€p^o\6yo9 of the first motto on his title- 
page might perhaps be worse rendered than by 



PREFACE. vii 



the Shakspearian phrase, a snapper-up of uncon- 
sidered trifles. But all who are in the least likely 
to become purchasers know him of old. They 
have taken his measure, nor has he outgrown it. 
And to them he may say, at once demonstratively, 
deferentially, and deprecatingly, in the German 
rendering of the second motto, (and a lexicon 
ma)- throw a sinister side-light on the significance 
of aSoXea-xtai', to any whose Greek is becoming, 
like Hamlet's starved steed adage, ' something 
musty,') 3§r fenner bod) ten SDfrmn u-eH, raft ttati a fagt 

A considerable number of subjects for which no 
space could be found in the present volume, stand 
over for future publication, whether in the form of 
a Second Series, or as a separate work. 

F.J. 
Scpteinbcr, 1874. 



CONTENTS 



PACE 

Preface v-vii 

I— Saul among the Prophets (i Sam. x. II, 12). 

Prophet in his cnon country — Robert Brozon, Crabbe, Words- 
rtk — Nota from Schiller, Trench, Helps, Lytton — Perils of 
Familiarity as breeding contempt — Thoughts of Sir H. Taylor, 
Lewes, T. Brown, etc. — Royalty made too cheap — Xe Sit tor 
ultra Crepidam — Cobbler and Critic — A'nozoing one's capacity 
— Overstepping one's limits — Keeping to one's line of things — 
Miss Austen and the Prince Regent — Controversial Cobblers — 
Toplady and Olivers 1-20 

II.— David's Application of 'the Proverb of the An- 
cients' (1 Sam. xxiv. 13). 

'ictwe Proverbs — Revenge is sweet — Its after-taste of 
bitterness — Debasing spirit of revenge — A costly luxury . . . 21-2S 

III.— Heaviness for a Night, Joy in the Morning (Psalm 
xxx. 5). 

I .' at its darkest just before dawn — Next mornings cheery 
calm — The Two Voices 29-35 

IV.— Camp Festivities and Martial Drag (i Kincs xx. ii ; 

M. xxx. 16, 17). 

Donning and doffing harness — Victory presumptuously 
presumed — Historical illustrations of premature triumph . . 36-44 

.r.\L Prosperity (Prov. i. 32). 

WCCess — Cyrus, Pausanias, Pyrrhus, S 
Constantine, : miello, Robe spie rre, Lebon — J\;: 

VI — M ion (Prot.yL 13; x. 10). 

Eloquence of mute malice— Shrug, hum, and ha— , 
silence — Obtrusive n licence ' ' 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

VII. — Shouted out of the World ; or, Valedictory 
Malediction (Prov. xi. 10). 

When the tvicked perish — Post-mortem insultations : Alex- 
ander Jannceus, Tiberius, Herod Agrippa, Sejanus, Maximin, 
Richelieu, Lewis XIV. — Le Diable est mort ! 61-68 

VIII.— Secrets Blabbed and Secrets Kept (Prov. xi. 13). 
Alleged feminine incapacity for keeping of secrets — Exam- 
ples and exceptions from Shakspeare, Corneille, La Bruyere, 
Crabbe, Goldsmith , Manzoni, Hook, Colman, etc. — Approved 
good masters of secret-keeping : Locke, Pulteney, Cowper, Con- 
rart, Lewis XIV. — Art of Reticence— Servants' mastery of 
their Masters' secrets 69-87 

IX.— Counsellors Many, and Too Many (Prov. xi. 14 ; 
xxiv. 6). 

In the Midtitude of Counsellors is there safety ? — Whose 
safety ? — Boards and Committees 87-93 

X.— The Sure Side of Suretyship (Prov. xi. 15). 

Prudential proverbs — Surety for a stranger, and smarting 
for it — Bill transactions — Signing one's name to a bill, • a mere 
form'' — Warning examples in fiction 94- 1 03 

XI. — Brute Life held in Righteous Regard (Prov. xii. 10). 

The merciful man merciful to his beast — Seeing after one's 
steed — Sir Hemy Lawrence and his grey Arab — Elie's destrier 
Marchegay — Last days of an old horse — Superannuated steeds 
— Bitrn's auld 7nare Maggie — Burke in Beaconsfield Park — 
Cruelty to Animals — Legislation on their behalf ; opinions of 
Professor Wilson and John Stuart Mill — Killing for use and 
killing for sport — Brutality of human brutes — Utilitarian 
aspect of the question — Progress of humanity in England 
and abroad — ' Unreflecting dcvilishness ' 104-123 

XII. — Hope Deferred (Prov. xiii. 12). 

Heart-sickness of hope deferred— Columbus at Court — Mari- 
ana in the moated grange — Mary Tudor, Esther Vanhomrigh, 
Wordsworth's Margaret, Crabbe' s Ellen, Lytton's Lucilla, and 
other weary watchers in fiction — The hope that is deferred too 
long, and the fulfihnent that comes too late 124-135 

XIII.— The Heart's own Secret of Bitterness (Prov. xiv. 
10). 

Incommunicable sorrow : illustrations from Keble, Chateau- 
briand, Jackson, Dallas, H. Reed, George Eliot, Charlotte 
Bronte, Mrs. Riddell, E. Quillinan, Shelley, etc., etc. . . 136-141 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

XIV.— A Dinner of Herbs and Good Fellowship (Prov. 
xv. 17). 

Plain fare in peace and quietness — Daniels diet of pulse — 
XT taking to grass — Plain living and high think- 
ing—Bishop Skinner, IV. Hunter, etc. — Relish for homely fare, 
real and affected — Johnians of an obsolete type {A. D. 1 550) — 
Alexander Sezerus, Spinoza, Dryden, Addison, etc. . . 142-157 

XV. — Intolerant of Reproof (Prov. xv. 31, 32). 

Borromeds exceptional patience of reproof— Swifi to Stella — 
Di s cr imi n a tion in fault-fending — Fault-finding resented — 
Deter min ed not to ownimesdf in the wrong — Candid own 
of error 15S-172 

XVI. — VOlISPERED-AWAY FRIENDSHIPS (PROV. xvi. 2S). 

Poison of whispering tongues — Recklessness op wanton 
gossip — Advanced scholars of the school for scandal — Whisj. 

busybodies — The 'good-natured friends ' who circulate ill- 
natured reports — Proof against talebearers 173-1S4 

XVII. — Fair-weather Friends (Prov. xvii. 17; xix. 7). 

Poverty parts good company — Friendship declining into 
acquaintanceship — Dropping an acquaintance — Fortune on the 

>:e, friends on the wing 1S5-196 

XVIII.— Imposing Silence and Incontinent Chatter 
(Prov. xvii. 28). 

TJie reputation that may be gained, and kept, by simply hold- 
ing one's tongue — Polite taciturnity —Irrepressible cacklers — 
Nothing to say, said at full length 1 96-206 

XIX. — Answered Unheard (Prov. xviii. 13). 

// xring both sides — Political onesidedness — Convicted and 
Condemned unheard — Truth-seeking in a free spirit — Over hasty 
to understand and conclude 207-216 

XX. — Brothers at Strife (Prov. xviii. [9). 

Is of fratricide — 'Living like (WO brothers' — '. 
ritr. ; rum odia 1 — Border enmities — 'Inter finitimos 
immortale odium' — Fetid* of families and races — Ciui. 
hourly neighbours — Odium theologicum — The 'exquisite rat; 
of theological hatred' 2l6 -J2 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

XXI.— The Continual Dropping of a Contentious Wife 
(Prov. xix. 13; xxvii. 15). 

Shrews and scolds — Wives of Socrates, Albert Diirer, 
Luther, Hooker, Scherceus, Tertullian, Wesley — Making home 
a purgatory — Fei?rinine fractiousness — Continual dropping, or 
dripping 232-242 

XXII. — The Divinity that Shapes our Ends (Prov. xx. 
24). 

Man proposes, God disposes — Overruling Providence . . 243-249 

XXIII. — The Bondage that comes of Borrowing (Prov. 
xxii. 7). 

The born and bred borrower — The jaunty habitual debtor — 
Co77ifortably deep in debt — The borrower a bondman — Healthy 
horror of debt — Degradation of debt — Sensitively scrupulous as 
to debt 249-260 

XXIV. — As Vinegar upon Nitre (Prov. xxv. 20). 

Songs that jar on an aching heart — Bianca and the Night- 
ingales — Levity and dejection 261-266 

XXV. — The Curse Causeless (Prov. xxvi. 2). 

Lmpotent imprecations — Curses that come home to roost — 
Fallible Papal execrations — Maledictions deprecated, derided, 
and defied 266-272 

XXVI.— Meddler's Mischance (Prov. xxvi. 17). 

Meddling in strangers' strife — Sganarelle, Martine, and 
Monsieur Robert— Making a muddle of meddling— Selfish ab- 
stention 273-277 

XXVII.— Sportive Mischief (Prov. xxvi. 19). 

Practical jokers — Reckless jesters — Making a foe for the sake- 
of a jest — Unenviable renown for repartee — Too fond of one's 
jest to spare one 's best friend 277-290 

XXVIII. — Self-bestowed Praise (Prov. xxvii. 2). 

Blowing one's own trumpet—Resolute self-assertion— Ln- 
domitable self-assurance — Lmpolitic self-disparagement — Art oj 
self -valuation — Absurdly apologetic — Tricks of self-disparage- 
ment — Taken at one's own valuation — ' Dreadfully humble 
people'— Praise from the praiseworthy— The dearest praise oj 
ali 291-314 



COXTEXTS. 



PAGE 

XXIX. — Friendly Wounds (Prov. xxvii. 6). 

'■.fid are the wounds of a friend ' — Loving reproof— 

Telling unpalatable truths — Taking pleasure in giving pain — 

Impish tendency to teaze — Art of reprehending without offend- 

— St. Francis Xavier, Bishop Sanderson, St. Francis de 

Sales — Stinging rebuke — Tender expostulation .... 314-330 

XXX. — Sated with Superfluity (Prov. xxvii. 7). 

Loathed honeycomb — 'Touj'ours perdrix 1 — Too much of a 
good thi>: relished by "way of a relief— Stomachs 
ith costly fare — Zest in roughing it for a change — 
'G 331-341 

XXXI.— Heart Responsive to Heart (Prov. xvii. 19). 

One touch of nature — The soft infection of tears — The heart 
of man one and the same, all the -world over, and for all time — 
The affections immortal 341—353 

XXXII.— Inexpugnable Foolishness (Prov. xxvii. 22). 

Impenetrable dulness — Imperturbable stupidity — Self -com - 
placent stolidity— Xo fool like an old fool 353~359 

XXXIII.— Passing Fair (Prov. xxxi. 30). 

Beauty a fading flower — Physical charms compared with 
:ome expression — Is beauty only skin deep ? — Platitudes 
depreciatory of the real value of beauty — The loveliness that is 
b*ti*g 359-373 

XXXIV.— X- ' New Thing under the Sun (Eccles. i. 9, 10). 

A disputed pro-, erb — Dutens, Fournier, etc. — Does history 

■ical parallels 373-3^2 

XXXV. — The Si i : <:les. ii. 14; Isa. xlii. 20). 

Mr. Car ' — Insight and clear vision 
— One-eyed s.'r, rtgth of sight — Clear-sighted short-sight — Eyes 
and no eyes — Keen observers of nature — % No speculation in those 
eyes 1 — A soulless gaze — An empty Eye-socket 3S2-39S 

XXXVI.— Beautiful in ii. 1, 11). 

i.'iful in its time — The seasons — Child 
and age — Th, fure 399-402 

XXXV 1 1. A 'I [Ml TO ] iiL 4). 

r : in chu, 
fie. .ter — Silly laughter 



CONTENTS. 



—Stifling a laugh— Pleas for laughter— Never seen to laugh — 

No laugh on record of the Man of Sorrows 402-419 

XXXVIII.-A Time to Hate (Eccles iii. 8). 

Divine example of hate — A good hater— Knowing how to 
hate — German vigour of hate — A series of good haters : Luther ; 
Leicester, Guy Patin, Bolingbroke, Swift, Pope, Duchess of 
Marlborough, Horace Walpole, Burns, Cobbett, Sir Philip 
Francis, George ILL, Thurlow, Vbss, Dr. Wolff, M. Veuillot, 
Dr. Arnold— Defective power of hate — Affinity of love to 
hate 419-434 

XXXIX. — Fast-asleep Toil and Wide-awake Care (Eccles. 
v. 12). 

Wealthy and care-worn, Poor and light-hearted — Sancho 
snores while the Don soliloquizes •— Prince } s envy of peasanfs 
sowid sleep — Loss of sleep, from ca?~e, remorse, sorrow, sickness, 
age — Sleeplessness and insanity — Unfailing capacity for sleep — 
A variety of soporific specifics 434-45 7 

XL.— A Deadly Fight that must be Fought out (Eccles. 
viii. 8). 

The last struggle — No discharge in that war — The pang oj 
conscious helplessness in watchful bystanders at a deathbed — 
Love not stronger than Death, when a dear life is at stake — Sad 
unhelpful tears 458-465 

XLI. — Sentence Passed, Execution Delayed (Eccles. viii. 
11). 

Belated penalties of wrong-doing — Retribution delayed, not 
forgotten — Vengeance slow but sure 465-470 

XLIL— A Taint of Folly in the Wise (Eccles. x. i). 

Follies of the Wise, and Foibles of the Great — Lnconsistency of 
human nature— Johnson, Luther, Julian, Napier of ' Merc his - 
ton, W. Sharp, Raleigh, Richelieu, Frederick the Great, 
Catharine II. , Lord Clive — Sportive element in great men : 
William the Silent, Cromwell, etc. — Pronounced lovers of non- 
sense : Erskine, Flaxman, Robert Story, Julius Hare, Hogarth, 
Home Tooke, Burns, Sydney Smith, Lamb, Southey, De 
Quincey, Bishop Lonsdale, Casimir PerUr — Great powers and 
fine qualities marred by one radical defect 470-485 

XLI II.— Casting Bread upon the Waters (Eccles. xi. 1). 
All work is as seed sown — No good work is done in vain — 
Every good deed is a part of the life of the world— Sowing 
beside all waters 485-493 



COXTEXTS. 



XLIV. — 'Physician, Heal Thyself' (St. Luke iv. 23). 

Inconsequent precept and practice — Death and the doctors — 
Doctors at the dinner-table — Pastors and primrose paths . 493 -503 

XLV.— Blind-led Blind (St. Luke vi. 39). 

Can the blind lead the blind? — \V7iere no Vision, the people 
perish — Citations from Spenser, Shakspeare, La Fontaine, 
Goethe, Crabbe, Carlyle, Shelley, South 5°3 _ 5°S 

XLYI.— A Divided Service (St. Matt. vi. 24). 

God and Mammon — Mammon-worship — The 'almighty 
dollar' — Mating haste to be rich — 'May one be pardoned, and 
retain the offence ? ' — Incompatible allegiances — Praying and 
sinning en 509-518 

XLVII. — Casting Pearls before Swine (St. Matt, vii.6). 

Illustrations from Shakspeare, Cowper, Chesterfield, Gold- 
smith, Landor, Coleridge, etc. — Reserve in imparting religious 
mysteries — Pig- h ended people — Impervious to a rgu m en t — Futile 
attempts to convince 5*8-53° 

XLVIIL— An Eve with a Beam, and an Eye for a Mote 
(St. Luke vi. 41, 42). 

Plank and splinter — Faulty fault-finders — Corrupt assail- 
ants of corruption — Swift 's fat man in a crowd — Keen sense of 
the ridiculous, in others — '0 wad some Pozo'r the giflie gie us to 
see oursets as it hers see us /' — Parallel passages from Sir Thos. 
Browne, Adam Smith, Leighton, Cowper, Swift, Windham, 
Shakspeare, Joanna Baillie, Jean Paul, La Bruyere, Mon- 
taigne, George Eliot, IV. C. Roscoe, R. Browning . . . 531-544 

XXIX. — One TO Sow, Another to Reap (St. John iv. 37). 

1 Sic vat nan vabis* — Citations from Prescolt, ATewman, 
Clough, Buckle, M. Arnold, Dallas, Adam Smith, Plutarch, 
Shakspeare, Scott, Swift 545—552 

L.— Beginning to Build, and not able to Finish (St. 
Luke xiv. 30). 

Extravagant schemes and txigu US results — Vast literary 
des: • ' s History, etc. — Great expectations unfulfilled — 

mising youth, the promise not kept in after life : refections 
by Sea tiger, Johnson, .Swift, South n, 

e, etc. — Starting on the race with leaps and bounds, 
an: in a dull jog trot — 'Omnium consensu ca] 

imperii, nisi impel tloa, Maxirnus, Drusus, 1,'er- 



xvi CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

manicus, Carteret, etc. — Taken on credit, till found out — 
Potentiality and performance 55 2_ 5^4 

LI. — Always Liars (Titus i. 12). 

Epinienides the Cretan and his esti?nate of the Cretans — 
Lies the coward's weapons — Consummate artists in lying — 
Liars deliberate, inventive, and circumstantial — Lndustrious, 
unscrupulous, and incorrigible liars — Audacities of inventive 
mendacity — Sheer and shameless fabrication 5^4~577 

LII. — Evil Communications (i Cor. xv. 33). 

Corrupting example and influence — ' Noscitur ex sociis ' 
— Contaminated by veterans in vice — 'Maxima debetur pueris 
reverentia ' — Detestable proselytisjn by toothless satyrs and 
tottering debauchees — Crabbe's Blayney . . . ... . 577~593 

Index 595-604 



SCRIPTURE PROVERBS, 



i. 

SAUL AMONG THE PROPHETS. 
i Samuel x. ii ; 12. 

IT was they that were his old acquaintance, "all that 
knew him beforetime," that exclaimed, one to ano- 
ther, " What is this that is come unto the son of Kish ? 
Is Saul also among the prophets ?" when they saw and 
heard him prophesying among the company of prophets. 
Sent out to seek his father's stray asses, — well and good : 
there he might be in his element, and in the success of 
such a mission there would be nothing for his acquaint- 
ance to wonder at. But prophesying was altogether 
another matter. Was not the young man stepping, or 
striding rather, out of his sphere ? And so it became a 
proverb, " Is Saul also among the prophets ?" 

Ages later, another Saul excited a quite equal amount 
of astonishment, when from anti-christian zealot he 
turned Christian all at once and altogether. Saul of 
Tarsus a disciple! The disciples themselves believed 
not that he zcas a disciple. 

The original proverb connected with the name may 
be variously interpreted and applied. The most obvious 
interpretation seems to be that which makes it in effect 
identical with the New Testament adage, or saw, about 
the prophet being of no account in his own country 

B 



SAUL AMONG THE PROPHETS. 



in his father's house.* An old divine speaks of men as 
naturally given to malign the greatness of a fellow- 
citizen or one of the same household : they think the 
nearness of it upbraids and obscures them : " A prophet 
may, without the help of his prophetic spirit,, foresee 
that he shall have but little honour in his own country." 
Is not this the carpenter's son ? and have we not seen 
Him in His shop and His cottage among His pitiful 
kindred ? 

Que fat toujours hat les pensees du vulgaire! avows La 
Fontaine : — 

" Qu'il me semble profane, injuste, et teme'raire, 
Mettant de faux milieux entre la chose et lui, 
Et mesurant par soi ce qu'il voit en autrui ! 

" Le maitre d'^picure en fit l'apprentissage. 
Son pays le crut fou. Petits esprits ! Mais quoi ! 
Aucun n'est prophete chez soi." f 

Trying to interest Sir Robert Peel — who, of all our 
leading public men, had the credit of being the one who 
perhaps best appreciated science- — in the fortunes of 
Robert Brown, Humboldt sarcastically said, "When 
Robert Brown travels in Germany, his arrival in a town 
is no sooner known than the young men gather under 
the great man's window, and salute him with a serenade ; 
when he returns to his own country, nobody notices his 
existence, and the Minister who claims to be the especial 
friend and patron of science does not know the name 
of the man whose work will survive when the British 
Parliament itself is forgotten." Prave 'ords ! as Parson 
Evans has it. 

* Of which saw, or adage, a chapter of illustrations may be seen 
in Secular Annotations on Scripture Texts, First Series, pp. 
I43-H7. 

+ Democrite et les Abde'ritains. 



SAUL AMONG THE PROPHETS. 



In conversation with James Smith, Crabbe is said to 
have expressed great astonishment at his own popularity 
in London, adding, " In my own village they think no- 
thing of me." When Mr. Crabb Robinson was sojourn- 
ing in the Lake Country in 1816, he entered in that 
omnivorous Journal of his what he regarded as " a 
singular illustration of the maxim, 'A prophet is not 
without honour save in his own country.' Mr. Hutton, 
a very gentlemanly and seemingly intelligent man, 
asked me, ' Is it true — as I have heard reported — that 
Mr. Wordsworth ever wrote verses ?'" 

The villagers in Schiller's Maid of Orleans are as 
much taken by surprise at Joan's ecstatic previsions as 
were the neighbours of Kish at the prophesyings of his 
stalwart son. 

" What strange power 

Hath seized the maiden ? — Mark her flashing eye, 
Her glowing cheek, which kindles as with fire ! 
* # # * * 

Hark how she speaks ! Why, whence can she obtain 
This glorious revelation?" 

Archbishop Trench's comment on what grew to be a 
proverb in Israel, is, that when the son of Kisit revealed 
of a sudden that nobler life which had hitherto been 
slumbering in him, alike undreamt of by himself and 
by others, took his part and place among the sons of 
the prophets, and, borne along in their enthusiasm,* 
praised and prophesied as they did, showing that he was 
indeed turned into another man, the question raised, by 

* It is characteristic of Lord Shaftesbury of the Characteristics 

pretend not to determine'' how far (his are the italics and 
his the capitals) "that dark ENTHUSIASM or evil Spirit" which 

irbed the first monarch of the Jewish nation, himself "of 
a Melancholy Complexion" "might resemble that of Prophecy, 
by him even after his Apostacy [1 Sam. xix. 2}, 24J." 
Shaft' har act eristics i vol. iii. p. 116, edit. 1732. 



UNRECOGNIZED MERIT. 



some probably in sincere astonishment, by some in 
irony and unbelief, was one which found and still finds 
its application so often as any reveals of a sudden, at 
some crisis of his life, qualities for which those who 
knew him the longest had hitherto given him no credit, 
a nobleness which had been latent in him until now, a 
power of taking his place among the worthiest and the 
best, which none until now had at all given him credit 
for. 

Milverton the essayist disputes the correctness of 
Ellesmere's phrase, "domestic malignity," in such cases. 
It is not malignity, he contends ; at least very often 
not ; frequently it is mere ignorance. " If you had a 
younger brother, of great musical talents, his gaining 
any honour or reward for their exercise would prove to 
you the existence of those talents in a way which you 
would never have arrived at for yourself." Such hon- 
ours, in such a case, not only reward merit, but declare 
its existence. In a more recent publication, Sir Arthur 
Helps begs attention to a "most important" bit of 
advice, and that is, to praise those you live with, if they 
really deserve it ; not to be silent upon their merits, for 
you should cultivate their reasonable self-esteem. If 
they have merits, other people — strangers — will, he 
argues, tell them of it, and they think it unkind of you 
who have lived with them, and ought to love them, not 
to have recognized their merits. " A person shall live 
with a person his junior, and during the whole of his life 
shall never have told that junior of his good qualities or 
his merits ; and it is only perhaps when that first person 
dies, that the other finds out that, during the time they 
had lived together, he had been thoroughly appreciated ; 
but, unfortunately, it has been a silent appreciation." 
The late Lord Lytton reckoned it a singular fact that 
we never seem to judge of our near kindred so well as 



THE PROPHET AND HIS KINSFOLK. 5 

we judge of others. " I appeal," says Morton Devereux, 
" to any one, whether, of all people by whom he has 
been mistaken, he has not been most often mistaken by 
those with whom he was brought up." He has grown 
rather more cynical by the time he observes in opening 
Book the Sixth of his autobiography, that, in general, men 
are the less mourned by their families in proportion as 
they are the more mourned by the community : " The 
great are seldom amiable ; and those who are the least 
lenient to our errors are invariably our relations." 

Goethe's Olearius confesses to having Latinized his 
name, from Oilman, after the example and with the 
advice of many jurists, for the decoration of the title- 
pages of his legal dissertations ; and Liebetraut tells him 
he did well to translate himself: "A prophet is not 
honoured in his own country ; your books if written in 
German might have shared the same fate." The Abbot 
repeats the Scripture saw about the prophet at home 
failing of honour ; and Liebetraut asks him, " But do 
you know why, most reverend sir?" "Because he was 
born and bred here," the Abbot replies. Well, that may 
be one reason, Liebetraut agrees ; another is, " because, 
upon a nearer acquaintance with these gentlemen, the 
halo of glory and honour shed around them by the dis- 
tant haze totally disappears ; and they are then seen to 
be nothing more than tiny rushlights." It is noticeable, 
as a less caustic observer has said, that nobody was 
ever canonized till he was safe from the report of near 
neighbours, and remembered only for his acts, not with 
the accompaniment of the daily life in which they were 
worked out under the scrutiny of eye-witnesses. "Peo- 
ple who are critical enough of the virtue of their own 
times are charitable to Roman patriots or Christian 
ascetics." Lovers of the past, laudatorcs temporis acti, 
have been known to settle the question by a Scriptural 



PERILS OF FAMILIARITY 



quotation, " there were giants in those days " — and in 
looking back on great men, conspicuous and eminent 
for one virtue, and constituting our example, the world 
is ready to assume that they were everything else 
besides. " But, in fact, who knows what Curtius was in 
the bosom of his family ?" Dr. Boyd questions whether 
any clergyman is a saint to his beadle. And he calls to 
remembrance his once hearing a clever and enthusiastic 
young lady complain of what she had suffered on meet- 
ing " a certain great bishop " at dinner : no doubt he was 
dignified, pleasant, clever ; but the mysterious halo was 
no longer around his head. Major e longiuquo reverentia, 
says Tacitus : respect is greater a good way off. 

In the want of the familiarity which proverbially 
breeds contempt, Professor Marsh finds the true expla- 
nation of the different impressions produced by euphe- 
mistic and vulgar words of the same meaning. And he 
holds it to be for the same reason that coarseness of 
thought, or of diction, in the literature of languages in 
which we are not entirely at home, is a less repulsive, 
and therefore, perhaps, a more dangerous source of 
corruption. 

The deadliest foe to love, accomplished St. John is 
made to affirm by one of his foremost admirers and 
imitators, is custom ; for with custom die away the 
delusions and the mysteries which encircle it, — custom 
leaving nothing to romance, and often but little to 
respect : the whole character is bared before us like a 
plain, and the heart's eye grows wearied with the same- 
ness of the survey. " And to weariness succeeds distaste, 
and to distaste, one of the myriad shapes of the Proteus 
Aversion ; so that the passion we would make the 
rarest of treasures fritters down to a very instance of the 
commonest of proverbs ; and out of familiarity cometh 
indeed contempt." Another popular writer takes objec- 



AS ENGENDERING CONTEMPT. 



tion to the saw, asserting that contempt is only en- 
gendered of familiarity with things which are in them- 
selves base and spurious. " The priest, who is familiar 
with the altar, learns no contempt for its sacred images ; 
but it is rather the ignorant neophyte who sneers and 
sniggers at things which he cannot understand." So 
again the artist becomes only more reverent as toil and 
study make him more familiar with his art ; its eternal 
sublimity grows upon him, and he worships his ideal as 
devoutly when he drops his brush or his chisel after a 
life of patient labour, as he did when first he "ground 
colour or pointed rough blocks of marble for his master." 
Churchill but wrote like his very unclerical self when he 
maintained, that were Jove to lay his thunder by, and 
with his brethren of the sky descend to earth, — ■ 

11 He would be found, with all his host, 
A nine days' wonder at the most. 
Would we in trim our honours wear, 
We must preserve them from the air ; 
What is familiar men neglect, 
However worthy of respect." 

Even the most brilliant talent may lose its effect by 
too great familiarity, writes Beethoven to the Archduke 
Rudolph, when advising him to make a pause with the 
Lobkowitz concerts. Dr. South expatiates on the virtue 
of distance in preserving respect — so apt are we to 
imagine worth in things beyond our reach. "Moses 
was never more reverenced than when he wore his 
veil." The very sanctum sanctorum would not have 
been so profoundly venerated by the Jews had they 
been permitted to enter it, and to gaze and stare upon 
often as they did upon other parts of the temple. 
The high priest himself, we are reminded, who alone 
suffered to enter into it, yet was to do so but once 
a year; lest the frequency of the sight might insensibly 



REPUDIATION OF THE ADAGE 



lessen that adoration which so sacred a thing was still 
to maintain upon his thoughts. " Many men, who in 
their absence have been great and admirable for their 
fame, find a diminution of that respect upon their per- 
sonal presence ; even the great Apostle St. Paul himself 
found it so ; as he himself tells us, 2 Cor. x. 10. And 
upon the same account it is, that the kings of some 
nations, to keep up a living and a constant awe of 
themselves in the minds of their subjects, show them- 
selves to them but once a year ; and even that perhaps 
may be something of the oftenest, considering that per- 
sons whose greatness generally consists rather in the 
height of their condition, than in the depth of their 
understanding, seldom appear freely and openly, but 
they expose themselves in more senses than one." 
Philip van Artevelde speaks for himself, as an excep- 
tional man, a man of men, when he says, 

" That with familiarity respect 
Doth slacken, is a word of common use. 
I never found it so." 

Mr. Lewes protests against the notion of familiarity 
breeding contempt in any but contemptible minds, or 
for things contemptible. Thus, in art, a master-piece 
excites no sudden enthusiasm, but its emphasis grows 
with familiarity : we never become disenchanted ; we 
grow more and more awestruck at its infinite wealth. 
" Homer, Shakspeare, Raphael, Beethoven, Mozart, 
never storm the judgment ; but, once fairly in posses- 
sion, they retain it with increasing influence." So is 
Southey strenuous against an unreserved acceptance of 
the maxim, omne ignotum pro magnifico. There are 
things which we do not undervalue because we are 
familiar with them, but which are admired the more 
thoroughly they are known and understood : it is thus, 
he contends, with the grand objects of nature and the 



THAT FAMILIARITY BREEDS COXTEMPT 9 

finest works of art — with whatsoever is truly great and 
excellent. Whately speaks of early and long familiarity 
as being apt to generate a careless almost stupid indif- 
ference to many objects which, if new to us, would ex- 
cite a great and a just admiration ; and many are 
inclined even to hold cheap a stranger, who expresses 
wonder at what seems to us very natural and simple, 
merely because we have been used to it, while, in fact, 
our apathy is perchance a more just subject of contempt 
than his astonishment. A very different expositor of 
the uses and abuses of familiarity takes the instance of 
a man who sees Niagara for the first time, and shouts 
with rapture, or is speechless with admiration ; but who, 
the next day, thinks it simply a very fine fall ; and to 
whom, the next week, it does not appear to tumble half 
so grandly as it did — and he wishes the water would 
come down in another fashion. " Unless, like a fire- 
work, it alters its effects every minute, he wearies of it. 
And yet it is as grand as ever ; the same volume is 
pouring forth, — the same iris of brilliant light encom- 
passes it, — it sparkles and flashes as of old." But the 
gazer in question measures the sensation only by the first 
effect it produced ; and unless it can, in itself, exceed 
this by some new and utter convulsion of its nature, it 
is, to him, no more worth regarding. Dr. Thomas 
Brown expatiates on the fact that objects which originally 
excited the very highest interest, cease to interest, if long 
continued, and soon become painful. Who, that is not 
absolutely deaf, he asks, could sit for a whole day in a 
music-room, if the same air, however exquisite, were 

in again and again in the very instant of its last 
note ? The most beautiful couplet of the most beautiful 

:n, if repeated to us without intermission, for a very 
tew minutes, would, he pretty safely maintains, excite 
more uneasiness than could have been felt from a single 



io ROYALTY MADE TOO CHEAP. 

recitation of the dullest stanza of the most soporific in- 
diter of rhymes. Quod rarum carum, runs the Latin 
adage ; vilescit quotidianum. Pericles is said to have 
been careful not to make his person cheap among the 
people, and to have shown himself among them at dis- 
creetly distant intervals. Peter Pindar's Windsor gar- 
deners, "lo! with majesty grew tired," and soon began 
to " fancy monarchs much like common folk." Shak- 
speare's Fourth Henry tells the future Harry the Fifth, 
contrasting the cautious dignity and self respecting 
policy of Bolingbroke with the cheap familiarities of the 
madcap prince, FalstafT's fellow in all companies, 

" Had I so lavish of my presence been, 
So common-hackney'd in the eyes of men, 
So stale and cheap to vulgar company ; 
Opinion, that did help me to the crown, 
Had still kept loyal to possession, 
And left me in reputeless banishment, 
A fellow of no mark, nor likelihood. 
By being seldom seen, I could not stir, 
But, like a comet, I was wonder'd at : 
That men would tell their children, 'That is he;' 
Others would say, 'Where? which is Bolingbroke?'" 

Thus did he keep his person fresh and new ; his pre- 
sence, like a robe pontifical, ne'er seen, but wondered 
at ; and so his state, seldom, but sumptuous, showed like 
a feast, and won, by rareness, such solemnity. Mean- 
while, the " skipping king " ambled up and down with 
shallow jesters, and mingled his royalty with capering 
fools — 

" Grew a companion in the common streets, 
EnfeofPd himself to popularity, 
That being daily swallowed by men's eyes, 
They surfeited with honey, and began 
To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof little 
More than a little is by much too much. 
So, when he had occasion to be seen, 



NE SUTOR ULTRA C REP ID AM. u 

He was but as the cuckoo is in June, 

Heard, not regarded; seen, but with such eyes 

As, sick and blunted with community, 

AtYord no extraordinary gaze, 

Such as is bent on sun-like majesty 

When it shines seldom in admiring eyes : 

But rather drowzed, and hung their eyelids down, 

Slept in his face, and renderd such aspect 

3 cloudy men use to their adversaries ; 

.ng with his presence glutted, gorged, and full."' 

Continues aspcctus minus verendos magnos homines 

facit, is Livy's warning. If a prince, says one of our 
seventeenth century divines, condescend to be familiar 
with those of basest decree, shall his condescension 
therefore unking him, and his familiarity rob him of his 
royalty ? " The case is the same with Christ. Men 
cannot persuade themselves that a deity and infinity 
should lie within so narrow a compass as the contempt- 
ible dimensions of a human body : that omnipotence, 
omniscience, and omnipresence should be ever wrapped 
in swaddling clothes, and abased to the homely usages 
of a stable and a manger : that the glorious artificer of 
the whole universe, who 'spread out the heavens like a 
curtain, and laid the foundations of the earth,' could 
ever turn carpenter, and exercise an inglorious trade in 
a little cell.'' 

Recurring to the more direct import of the text con- 
cerning Saul among the prophets, another application of 
it is found when one does not, as Dr. Trench words it, 
"step truly, but only affects suddenly to step, into a 
her school," to take his place in a nobler circle of life 
than that in which hitherto he has moved. Ne SUtor 
ultra crepidam is a saw traditionally as old as Apelles. 
hacun a son metier doit toujours s'attacher," is the 

metrical moral of a fable of La Fontaine's. It is pre- 



12 NE SUTOR ULTRA CREPIDAM. 

sumably for the consolation of smaller men, though to 
the grief of judicious admirers, that gifted souls, every 
now and then, risk their reputation in their own art by 
meddling with one for which they have no training. 
" Newton will rush into theology. Turner will paint 
figure-subjects," and, it might be added, compose The 
Fallacies of Hope. " Frederick will compete with Vol- 
taire in French poetry. Raffaelle models a feeble statue 
of Jonah. Canova attempts oil-painting." And the 
wisdom of the old saw Ne sutor ultra crepidam is said 
with truth to be daily receiving fresh illustrations : the 
strange impulse to forsake one's proper line, and attempt 
something new, foreign, and fascinating, has always 
afforded rare sport to cynics and satirists, and is indeed 
one of the most pitiful weaknesses to which human 
nature is liable. When Dr. Radcliffe was reluctantly 
summoned at the last by the Princess of Denmark, after- 
wards Queen Anne, who personally disliked him, to 
save, if might be, the ebbing life of her son, the heir- 
presumptive to the crown, he at once pronounced the 
case hopeless, but vented his abuse upon the two other 
physicians in no measured terms, — telling them it would 
have been happy for this nation had the first been bred 
up (like his father) a basket-maker, and had the other 
continued making havoc of nouns and pronouns in the 
quality of a country schoolmaster, rather than have 
ventured out of his reach, in the practice of an art which 
was utterly beyond him, and for dabbling in which he 
ought to have been whipped with one of his own rods. 
Dr. John Brown in his essay on " The Doctor," makes 
out the first duty of that personage to be to cure you— 
if he can : that is what we call him in for ; and a doctor, 
be he never so clever and delightful, who doesn't cure, is 
likened to a mole-catcher who can't catch moles, or a 
watchmaker who can do everything but make your watch 



COBBLER AXD CRITIC. 



go. We are then told of a Perthshire D.D., that when 
preaching in the country he found his shoes wanted 
mending, and asked the brother-minister whom he was 
assisting to tell him of a good cobbler, and one " Thomas 
Rattray, a godly man, and an elder," being named, the 
D.D. rejoined, "But can he mend my shoes ? that's what 
I want ; I want a shoemaker ; I'm not wanting an elder." 
And it turned out that Tammas was a better elder than 
shoemaker. This reminds one of Macaulay's argument 
about nobody having ever thought of compelling cobblers 
to make any declaration on the true faith of a Christian ; 
and his assertion that any man would rather have his 
shoes mended by a heretical cobbler than by a person 
who had subscribed all the thirty-nine articles, but had 
never handled an awl — men acting thus, not because 
they are indifferent to religion, but because they do not 
see what religion has to do with the mending of their 
shoes. To the same effect is his argument in another 
place, that although it is of much more importance 
that the knowledge of religious truth should be widely 
diffused than that the art of sculpture should flourish 
among us, yet does it by no means follow that the Royal 
Academy ought to unite with its present functions those 
of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, to 
distribute theological tracts, and to send forth mission- 
aries ; for the result of such a course would be that we 
should have the worst possible academy of arts, and the 
worst possible society for the promotion of Christian 
knowledge. 

When a late popular entertainer gave signs of panting 
to be the social regenerator of his age, and to be allowed 
to give his opinion on all moot questions, religious, social, 
and political — but especially on missionaries and their 
work in the far east — he was told by the critics that he 
was, confessedly! ail excellent judge of wide-awakes and 



14 KNOWING ONES POWERS. 

travelling knapsacks, and had an admirable way of 
tracking the British hero, Jenkins, round both the hemi- 
spheres ; but that he should leave philanthropic societies 
and religion alone. The power of talking slang he might 
possess in perfection, but when he mixed with it dis- 
cussion of serious things, " he gives us," complained his 
censors, "more than we either desire or deserve." It 
has been said there are three degrees of competency 
and incompetency — to be able to do a thing, to be un- 
able and know that you are unable, and to be unable 
and not know that you are unable. "Nobody would 
have found fault with Richelieu for not writing good pas- 
torals, but much fault has been deservedly found with 
him for complacently publishing bad ones." One of 
Johnson's Ramblers was indited to show how little the 
strongest faculties can perform beyond the limits of their 
own province. Johnson himself is taxed by Macaulay 
with just this kind of transgression in the case of his 
Taxation no Tyranny, which "was a great mistake." 
Not that Johnson failed, on his critic's showing, because 
his mind was less vigorous than when he wrote Rasselas 
in the evenings of a week, but because he had foolishly 
chosen, or suffered others to choose for him, a subject 
such as he would at no time have been competent to 
treat. He failed, Macaulay insists, as the greatest men 
must fail when they attempt to do that for which they 
are unfit, as Burke would have failed if Burke had tried 
to write comedies like Sheridan ; as Reynolds would 
have failed if Reynolds had tried to paint landscapes 
like those of Wilson. No Reynolds, no Wilson, was the 
artist to whom Peter Pindar addressed the fifteenth of 
his Odes to the Royal Academicians : 

" Well pleased, thy horses, Stubbs, I view, 

And eke thy dogs, to Nature true : 
Let modern artists match thee, if they can ; 



OVERSTEPPING OXES LIMITS. 



Such animals thy genius suit — 
Then stick, I beg thee, to the brute, 
And meddle not with woman, nor with man." 

To brutes did Dean Swift, with something of character- 
istic brutality, as the French phrase goes — and Swift was 
cynic enough to at least verge on the brutal, cynicism 
being in the nature of the thing, or by the nature of the 
beast, brutality, — to brutes did the author of Gullii 
ascribe a marked superiority over men in respect of 
respecting the bounds of their capacity, and recognizing 
the length of their tether. In one of his metrical pieces 
he affirms, for instance, that 

" Creatures of ever}- kind but ours 
Well comprehend their natural powers, 
While we, whom reason ought to sway, 
Mistake our talents every day.' ; 

In another, that 

" Brutes find out where their talents lie : 
A bear will not attempt to fly ; 
A founderd horse will oft debate 
Before he tries a five-barr d gate ; 
A dog by instinct turns aside, 
Who sees the ditch too deep and wide. 
But man we find the only creature 
Who. led by Folly, combats Nature; 
Who, when she loudly cries Forbear ! 
With obstinacy fixes there ; 
And where his genius least inclines, 
Absurdly bends his whole designs.'' 

La Bruyere speaks of this or that man who has "assez 
d'esprit pour exceller dans une ccrtaine matiere," but 
not enough to see " qu'il doit se taire sur quelque autre 
dont il n'a qu'une faible connaissance : il sort hardiment 
Limites deson genie," and forthwith is, to that extent, 
self-convicted of folly, and, what Dogberry so devoutly 
ired to be, written down an ass. Some men seem to take 



16 . KEEPING TO ONE'S LINE OF TALENT. 

literally the mis-readings or cross-readings of Shakspeare's 
sage serving-man in Romeo and Juliet: " It is written — 
that the shoemaker should meddle with his yard, and 
the tailor with his last, the fisher with his pencil, and the 
painter with his nets." Dryden has Englished the open- 
ing of Virgil's sixth Eclogue, where the sweet singer 
who first transferred to Rome Sicilian strains, essayed, 
too young, too high a theme of martial princes and 
tented fields, whereupon, 

" Apollo check'd my pride, and bade me feed 
My fattening flocks, nor dare beyond the reed," 

or humble pastoral pipe. Dryden it is that Macaulay 
charges, as elsewhere we have already seen him charg- 
ing Johnson, with overstepping his line of talent, and 
attempting success out of his natural sphere. Dryden 
saw, he remarks, that the greatest poets were never so 
successful as when they rushed beyond the ordinary 
bounds, and that some inexplicable good fortune pre- 
served them from tripping even when they staggered on 
the brink of nonsense ; but he did not perceive that 
they were guided and sustained by a power denied to 
himself. In this regard is Dryden contrasted with 
Horace, whose " admirable good sense " preserved him 
from the error of those contemporary imitators of Pindar 
whom he so happily compares to Icarus, the would-be 
flyer to heaven on waxen wings, but doomed to so fatal 
and ignominious a fall. Phoebus warns the Sabine 
farmer as well as the Mantuan shepherd, and to precisely 
the same effect : 

" Phcebus volentem praslia me loqui, 
Victas et urbes, increpuit, lyra, 
Ne parva Tyrrhenum per aequor 
Vela darem. " 

The " admirable good sense " of Horace taught him 
to cultivate a style in which excellence was within his 



JANE AUSTEN AXD THE PRIXCE REGEXT. 17 

reach ; and so doing, excel he did. Readers of the 
Life, who have first been intelligent readers of the 
Works, of Jane Austen, will appreciate her exemplary 
biographer's assurance that she was always very careful 
not to meddle with matters which she did not thoroughly 
understand. The Prince Regent's librarian at Carlton 
House, Mr. Clarke, writing at his royal master's instance, 
was very urgent that Mis n should take up a 

subject which she clearly felt to be not within the limits 
of her powers, or the proper field for their exercise. 
She wrote back, with her thanks for his kindne 
hinting the sort of composition which might recommend 
her at present, and an expression of her belief that such 
an historical romance, founded on the fortunes of the 
House of Saxc-Coburg, might be much more to the 
purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of 
domestic life in country villages as she dealt in. But 
then, she protested, she could no more write a romance 
than an epic poem. " I could not sit seriously down to 
write a serious romance under any other motive than to 
save" my life ; and if it were indispensable for me to 
it up, and never relax into laughing at myself or 
at other people, I am sure I should be hung be: 
had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep I 
own style, and go on in my own way ; and though I 
may :. tin in that, I am convinced that I 

should totally fail in ther." TJic Examiner. 

Queen Anne's time, admitting the justice of military 
complaint against coffee-house critics who med- 
dled with matters out of their sphere, was yet fain to 
retort that the soldiers of that day were, in their turn, 
but out of the way, unwi licted to "matters of 

the cabinet, which are always fir above, or much beside 
their capatitie liers may as well pretend to pre- 

scribe rules f. »r trade, to determine points in philosophy, 



18 NE SUTOR ULTRA CREPIDAM. 

to be moderators in an assembly of divines, or direct in 
a court of justice, as to misplace their talent in examin- 
ing affairs of state." In a Tatler of about the same 
date, a correspondent from Amsterdam is graphic anent 
a play he has just been seeing there, acted by tradesmen, 
who, after their day's work was over, earned about a 
guilder a night by personating kings and generals : the 
hero of the tragedy he saw was a journeyman-tailor, and 
his first minister of state a coffee-man ; and after the 
tragedy came a farce, " in which the cobbler did his part 
to a miracle ; but, upon inquiry, I found he had really 
been working at his own trade, and representing on the 
stage what he acted every day in his shop." It was 
clearly a case of not sutor ultra crepidam. The cobbler 
knew what he was about, and stuck to his last with a 
will. 

Dante points out in the depths of V Inferno a certain 
shoemaker of Parma, Asdente by name, who deserted 
his business to practise the arts of divination : 

" Asdente mark, 

Who now were willing he had tended still 

The thread and cordwain, and too late repents." 

An ironmonger, said Sydney Smith, is a very respect- 
able man, so long as he is merely an ironmonger, — an 
admirable man, if he is a religious ironmonger; but a 
great blockhead, if he sets up for a bishop or a dean, 
and lectures upon theology. Captain Gronow devotes a 
section of his Recollections to " Hoby, the bootmaker, of 
St. James's Street," the opening sentence of which in- 
forms us that Mr. Hoby was not only the greatest and 
most fashionable bootmaker in London, but, in spite of 
the old adage, Ne sutor, " he employed his spare time 
with considerable success as a Methodist preacher at 
Islington." His eminence as a fashionable tradesman 
would not have saved him from the wit of the wittiest of 



CONTROVERSIAL COBBLERS. 



Edinburgh Reviewers ; any more than it would have 
done a century and a half previously from that of the 
wittiest of English poets, whose spleen was stirred to the 
uttermost whenever 

" Botchers left old clothes in the lurch, 
And fell to turn and patch the church ; 
Some cried the covenant, instead 
Of pudding-pies and ginger-bread." 

- the sutor forgotten in a later canto : witness 
the couplet about the indulgence shown by the then 
ruling powers towards 

:nan that served them in a double 
Capacity, to teach and cobble." 

When Toplady found that John Wesley was leaving 
the doctrinal contest with him to be carried on by 
Olivers, he was incensed more and more, and called on 
the patriarch of Methodism to fight his own battles, and 
he would find the Reverend Augustus as ready as ever 
to meet him, "with the sling of reason and the stone of 
God's Word in my hand. But let him not fight by 
proxy ; let his cobblers keep to their stalls ; let his 
tinkers mend their brazen vessels ; let his barbers con- 
fine themselves to their blocks and basins ; let his black- 
smiths blow more suitable coals than those of nice con- 
: every man in his own order." And because 
Olivers had been a shoemaker, the "ever-memorable" 
r of Broad- Hembury attacked him on that score, 
with what Southey calls " abusive ridicule," both in 
nd in rhyme. In a doggerel dialogue, for in- 
lady makes Wesley speak thus of his ad- 
jutant : 



livers, the cobbler, 

land holds a nobler,) 

:.ts univei 

Whereof I'll give a brief relic. 



20 PEDDLIXG AND MEDDLING IN THEOLOGY. 

He wields, beyond most other men, 

His awl, his razor, and his pen ; 

My beard he shaves, repairs my shoe, 

And writes my panegyric too ; 

He, with one brandish of his quill, 

Can knock down Toplady and Hill ; 

With equal ease, whene'er there's need, 

Can darn my stockings and my creed ; 

Can drive a nail, or ply the needle, 

Hem handkerchiefs, and scrape the fiddle ; 

Chop logic as an ass chews thistle, 

More skilfully than you can whistle ; 

And then when he philosophizes, 

Xo son of Crispin half so wise is. 

Of all my ragged regiment, 

This cobbler gives me most content : 

My forgeries and faith's defender, 

My barber, champion, and shoe-mender." 

In private, however, Toplady is said to have done 
justice to this antagonist ; and we find him telling a cor- 
respondent, that had Mr. Olivers' understanding been 
cultivatejd by a liberal education, he would probably 
have made some figure in life. Not a whit, neverthe- 
less, would better acquaintance have availed to abate 
Mr. Toplady's loy r alty to the adage Ne sutor. If he 
ever read — which, as the elaborate Preface to Dr. John- 
son's Dictionary contained the poem as a whole, he 
probably did — the advice of a sometime High Chancel- 
lor of England, Sir Thomas More, he most likely 
relished it keenly, and adopted it entirely : 

" ZMist men altoagc xi sgmplc Ijattcr 

affirmc ano sage £ljoulti not p smarter 

Ojat 'tis best for a man Cn pljtlosopfytc ; 

EHltrrcntlg £or ougljt a peoolar 

JFor to applg Become a mcoolar 

Za tfjc business Ijc can, En ideologic." 
3no in no wgsc 
Co enterprise 

Stnotfjcr facultic. 



II. 

DAVIDS APPLICATION OF " THE PROVERB OF 
THE ANCIENTS? 

i Samuel xxiv. 13. 

IN the day that King Saul was in the hands of David 
in the cave, there wanted not one to advise that the 
persecuted fugitive should take the life of his persecutor, 
and so avenge him of his adversary. But the son of 
Jesse repudiated all vindictive counsels against the 
Lord's anointed. Hard pressed he was by the implac- 
able king of Israel, who degraded his majesty by pur- 

. of so unpretending a fugitive, — for after whom was 
the king come out ? "After a dead dog, after a flea ? " 
And with proof positive and palpable of his having but 
now had the king's life in his hand, to that king he 
appealed and he protested, " The Lord judge between 
me and thee, and the Lord avenge me of thee ; but 
mine hand shall not be upon thee. As saith the proverb 

he ancients, Wickedness proceedeth from the wicked 
but mine hand shall not be upon thee." Had he meant 
wickedly, David would have done wickedly that day. 
15ut his heart was in this matter pure from wickedr. 
It was right in the sight of God. It was loyal to the 
king. A good tree bringeth forth good fruit. Wicked- 
■ >f the wicked. It is an abomination for kings to 
commit wickedness, and so is it for the heirs to king- 
doms ; for the throne is established by righteousn 
A man that is royal must bear himself royally. Noblesse 
oblige. It was not for David to avenge himself — least of 
all by a stab in the dark. 

the pleading of Shakspeare's Clarence, " If 



22 VINDICTIVE PROVERBS.. 

God will be avenged for the deed " whose guilt the 
doomed man owns, — 

" Take not the quarrel from His powerful arm, 
He needs no indirect or lawless course 
To cut off those that have offended Him." 

Let thy arrows of revenge fly short, counsels the quaint 
old author of Christian Morals ; " or be aimed like 
those of Jonathan, to fall beside the mark. Too many 
there be to whom a dead enemy smells well, and who 
find musk and amber in revenge. The ferity of such 
minds holds no rule in retaliations, requiring too often a 
head for a tooth, and the supreme revenge for trespasses 
which a night's rest should obliterate." But the sweet- 
ness of revenge is intoxicating with some natures, 
evii-natured. Sternly. speaks Bothwellhaugh in Scott's 
ballad, — 

" 'Tis sweet to hear. 

In good greenwood, the bugle blown ; 
But sweeter to Revenge's ear, 

To drink a tyrant's dying groan." 

Archbishop Trench professes to know nothing of its 
kind calculated to give one a more shuddering sense of 
horror than the series which might be drawn together of 
Italian proverbs in glorification of revenge — especially 
w T hen we take them with the commentary which Italian 
history supplies, and which shows them no empty words, 
but the deepest utterances of the nation's heart. " There 
is no misgiving in these about the right of entertaining 
so deadly a guest in the bosom ; on the contrary, one 
of them, exalting the sweetness of revenge, declares, 
' Revenge is a morsel for God.' " Vendetta, boccon di 
Bio. Xor is there in them anything (far better if there 
were) of blind and headlong passion, but rather a 
" spirit of deliberate calculation, which makes the blood 
run cold." Thus, of others quoted by Dr. Trench, one 



REVENGE IS SWEET; 



gives this advice : " Wait time and place to act thy 
revenge, for it is never well done in a hurry ;" while an- 
other proclaims an immortality of hatred, which no 
spaces of intervening time shall have availed to weaken : 
" Revenge of an hundred years old hath still its sucking 
teeth " {ha ancor i lattaiuoli). 

Among all warlike barbarians, Lord Macaulay has 
remarked, revenge is esteemed the most sacred of duties 
and the i -uisite of pleasur 

The spirit of revenge, says Izaak Walton, is so pleas- 
ing to mankind, that it is never conquered but by a 
supernatural grace, being indeed so deeply rooted in 
human nature, that to prevent the excess of it (for men 
would never know moderation), Almighty God allows 
not any degree of it to man, but says, " Vengeance is 
mine :" and although this be said by God Himself, yet 
is revenge so pleasing, that "man is hardly persuaded to 
submit the manage of it to the time, and justice, and 
wisdom of His Creator, but would hasten to be his own 
executioner of it." Dead Sea fruit, or worse, though it 
be, revenge is often and often too pleasant to the eye, 
and, at first, too sweet in the mouth, to be foregone. 

It was in witnessing the execution of sixty-three 

retainers of the Lord of Balm, the accomplice of John 

of Hapsburg in the murder of the Emperor Albert, that 

the Empress Agnes exclaimed, as she watched the 

■' Now I bathe in honey-dew." What though 

she founded that magnificent convent of Kdnigstein, of 

which fine ruins still remain ? the rebuke of the hermit 

k the vengeful Empri ' i rod is not served by 

shedding innocent blood, and by building convents from 

the plunder of families, but by Confession and forgive- 

eance was His, not hers. But the 

idow was in the mood to reply much as the 

f Venice in : tragedy, to the reminder, 



24 BITTER SWEETNESS OF REVENGE. 

" Heaven bids us to forgive our enemies," as Heaven will 
forgive them. "Amen. May Heaven forgive them." 
" And will you ? " " Yes, when they are in heaven." 
" And not till then ? " — At vindicta bonum vita jiicundius 
ipsa, urges one voice of two in Juvenal ; but the other 
exclaims, Who talks this language ? the illiterate fool, 
whose brutal passions are his only rule, Nempe hoc in- 
docti, etc. " For, sure, revenge can never find a place 
but in a petty spirit, weak and base": Qitippe minuti 
Semper et infirmi est animi exiginque voliLptas. Talk of 
voluptas ! — the relief and satisfaction found in that in- 
dulgence is no other, contends Shaftesbury, than the 
assuaging of the most torturous pain, and the alleviating 
the most weighty and pressing sensation of misery : the 
sensation of relief he asserts to be, in truth, no better 
than that from the rack itself. When Ripert wants to 
know what attrait brulant, what overmastering bonheur, 
Laurent (in one of Soulie's historical fictions) can find 
in la vengeance, the latter breaks out, " Un attrait ! un 
bonheur ! C'est un effroi de toutes les heures et une 
torture de toutes les parties du cceur, et pourtant c'est 
une soif irresistible, c'est la soif des damnes ; c'est la 
soif de 1' ivresse quand la poitrine brule et demande, 
au lieu d'une eau pure, quelque vin qui la brule davan- 
tage." As with the vindictive Annabella in Miss Baillie's 
Witchcraft, with her iterations (that deserve the Shaks- 
pearian epithet often conjoined with that word), "Re- 
venge is sweet, revenge is noble, revenge is natural, what 
price is too dear for revenge ?" — or again, that like- 
minded tamperer with the black art in Scott's Rokeby, — 

" Here stood a wretch prepared to change 
His soul's redemption for revenge." 

Not much better is the man described in Crabbe's Tales 
of the Hall, — 



DEBASIXG SPIRIT OF REVENGE. 



' : -who kindness will requite, 

But, injured once, revenge is his delight, — 
And he would spend the best of his estates 
To ruin, goods and body, them he hates." 

The tale preceding it is one of implacable vindictiveness, 
and includes this passage of colloquy between two differ- 
ing spirits, on the subject of taking advantage of a rare 
and tempting opportunity : — 

" Revenge was thine — thou hadst the power, the right ; 
TO give it up was Heavens own act to slight.*' 

11 me not, sir, of rights, and wrongs, or powers ! 
I felt it written, Vengeance is not ours." 

Like Corneille's Antiochus : J' en laisse la vengeance aux 
dieux qui les connaissent ; and we have only to turn the 

c to find him congratulated, inasmuch as, by the 

ming intervention of a higher Power, La coupablc est 
panic, ct vos mains innocents. Parson Dale calls revenge 
the sin of the uninstructed : the savage deems it noble, 
but Christ's religion, which is the sublime civilizer, em- 
phatically condemns it. Why ? " Because religion ever 
seeks to ennoble man ; and nothing so debases him as 
revenge." One who cherishes that passion is bidden 
look into his own heart, and tell whether, since he has so 
cherished it, lie has not felt all sense of right and wrong 

■ fused — thus, whatever would before have seemed to 
him mean and base, appears now but just means to his 
ill ends. When Jane Eyre, as a child, tastes for the first 
time something of vengeance, "as aromatic wine it 

med, '>n swallowing, warm and racy," she says ; "its 

after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation 

been poisoned." The confession reads like 

a paraphrase of Dryden's lines, indicating how, were 
sounder principles received and acted 14)011 ill this world 
of ours, — 



26 FUMES OF GRATIFIED VENGEANCE. 

" Revenge would into charity be changed, 
Because it costs too dear to be revenged ; 
It costs our quiet and content of mind, 
And when 'tis compassed leaves a sting behind." 

Achilles, in the eighteenth book of the Iliad, speaks of 
wrath and revenge as " far, far too dear to every mortal 
breast, sweet to the soul as honey to the taste, gathering 
like vapours of a noxious kind from fiery blood, and 
darkening all the mind." When Ramorny desires to 
know what is the precious privilege in store for him, a 
prostrate, mutilated, crippled wretch, for whom never- 
theless his wily physician promises such a treat to come, 
— " The dearest that mankind knows," is Dwining's 
answer ; and then, in the accent of a lover who utters 
the name of his beloved mistress, and expresses his 
passion for her in the very tone of his voice, he adds the 
word " Revenge." In the hour of Elizabeth's humilia- 
tion, Schiller's Mary Stuart declares herself to be now 
happy indeed ; after whole years of sorrow and abase- 
ment, one moment of victorious revenge. " I plunged 
the steel in my oppressor's breast. . . . She carries 
death within her breast. I know it." Mr. de Quincey 
calls revenge a luxury, to those who can rejoice in it at 
all, so inebriating that possibly a man would be equally 
liable to madness, from the perfect gratification of his 
vindictive hatred or its perfect defeat. Of Blucher in 
Paris he says, " I have often wondered that he did not 
go mad with the fumes of gratified vengeance." But after 
all, the pleasure of revenge is likened by Jeremy Taylor 
to the pleasure of eating chalk and coals ; a foolish 
disease made the appetite, and it is entertained with an 
evil reward ; it is like the feeding of a cancer or a wolf ; 
" the man is restless till it be done, and when it is, every 
man sees how infinitely he is removed from satisfaction 
or felicity." Yet seems it as though never would human 



FRENZIED RAPTURE OF REVENGE, 27 

nature outgrow a relish for sweetness which sweet singers 
are fain to glorify ; as when one of them sings that 
though sweet are our home recollections, though sweet 
are the tears that from tenderness fall, though sweet are 
our friendships, our hopes, our affections, revenge on a 
tyrant is sweetest of all. Does the reader remember 
St. Simon's frank — perhaps brutally frank — avowal of 
his rapture at the fall of the Due du Maine? Dying 
with joy, he describes himself; so oppressed that he 
feared he must swoon ; his heart dilated to such an 
excess, that it no longer found room to beat. " The 
violence I did myself, in order to let nothing escape me, 
was infinite ; yet was this torment itself delicious. . . . 
I had triumphed, I was revenged ; I swam in my ven- 
geance ; I enjoyed the full accomplishment of desires 
the most vehement and continuous of all my life." We 
can fancy him prompt with an affirmative reply to each 
of those queries of Owen Feltham's which were meant 

licit a negative: Will it ease me, when I am vexed, 
to vex another ? Can another's suffering pain take off 
from my smart ? etc. A kind of frenzy, that old Eng- 
lish moralist st) les it, " and something irrational, because 
another hath done us a mischief, to hurt therefore our- 
selves that we may do him one. Perhaps it was from 
hence that poets have feigned that Nemesis was trans- 
formed by Jupiter into a goose (a silly creature), to 

x us the folly of revenge; for, at best, it is but 

returning evil for evil. . . . And while we throw a 

petty vengeance on the head of our offending brother, 

we boldly pull the Almighty's on our own." When 

id, by what South term- a " happy and seasonable 

ification" in the matter of Nabal, was "taken oft 
from acting that bloody tragedy which he was just 
entering upon," he turned hi from the baseness of 

the churl who had excited his spirit of vengeance, to the 



28 AFTER BITTERNESS OF SWEET REVENGE. 

goodness of that God who had prevented it, and so 
broke forth into the doxology, "Blessed be the Lord 
God of Israel, who has kept me this day from shedding 
blood, and from avenging myself with my own hand." 
The moral of Mr. Taylor's play of the Fool's Revenge is 
expressed in the Fool's cry towards its close, — 

" I would have grasp'd Heaven's vengeance, and have drawn 
The bolt on my own head." 

Milton's Satan has a like tale to tell, where he solilo- 
quizes that 

" Revenge, at first though sweet, 
Bitter ere long, back on itself recoils." 

Again and again in various of his works the late Lord 
Lytton was strenuous in writing down a cherished spirit 
of vindictiveness. His Maltravers tells Csesarini, there 
are injuries so great, that they defy revenge : " Let us 
alike, since we are alike injured, trust our cause to Him 
who reads all hearts, and, better than we can do, 
measures both crime and its excuses. . . . Let us 
rather seek to be the judges of ourselves, than the 
executioners of another." In almost his latest fiction 
he speaks of " the devil's grand luxury, Revenge," — and 
of man's mimetic folly in adding evil to evil, to retort 
on the man who wrongs, or even on " the Arch-Invisible 
who afflicts you." Of all our passions, is not Revenge, 
he asks, the one into which enters with most zest, a 
devil ? For what is a devil ? — A being whose sole work 
on earth, as this author defines it, is some revenge on 
God. 



III. 

HE A VINESS FOR A NIGHT, JOY IN THE 
MOIZNING. 

Psalm x.w. 5. 

HEAVINESS may endure for a night; and the 
night may be in winter, mid-winter, when the 
nights are long". But the Longest night has its limit. 
The profoundest darkness has its appointed term, and 
then day breaks, and the shadows flee away. Gladness 
revives with the dawn. Joy cometh in the morning. 
Though it tarry, wait for it ; it will surely come, though 
it seem to tarry. 

" Zctcn rer(cfcf?cn ftnt tic 2tuntcn, 
J? ingeftyttunt en 2«.f meq nut ®lu& ■ 
5uM' c3 001 ! Xu toitfl gefunben; 
uc neuetn logrtbliif." * 

When the Light of the World was about to be with- 
drawn from the children of light, they were told that 
they should be sorrowful, but their sorrow should be 
turned Into joy. "And ye now therefore have sorrow : 
but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice." 
Rejoice with the rising of the bright and morning 
.star. 

Often it is keenly felt to be darkest and dreariest just 



* Which lines from Goethe have been thus Englished by that 
ful translation, Mr. Theodore Martin: 

. the hours of night have vanish . 

Joy anil grief have passed away ; 
Wake I rejoice ! thy pain is banished, 
Trust the new advanci: 



30 DARKEST JUST BEFORE DA YBREAK. 

before daybreak.* As Pandulph words it, — 

" Evils, that take leave, 
On their departure most of all show evil." 

The shortest day was just past, and the winter nights 
were still at their longest, and Germany was preparing 
for a gloomy observance of Christmas in 1812, all hope 
of deliverance, or even of alleviation, from the distresses 
of French oppression seeming to be at an end ; when, as 
a Hamburgh citizen notes the fact, on the 24th of De- 
cember, to the glad surprise of all, there was a bulletin 
published which confirmed beyond all possibility of 
doubt the tidings, hitherto rumoured only, and incredu- 
lously slighted, of the " total annihilation of the French 
host." A miracle had been wrought, the biographer of 
Frederick Perthes writes, " and a star of hope had ap- 
peared which rekindled life and spirit in every oppressed 
heart. Such a Christmas Eve was kept in Hamburgh 
as had not been known for many a long year." So with 
Cowper's homely moral — 

"Beware of desperate steps. The darkest day, 
Live till to-morrow, will have passed away." 

Even in 1808, so once sanguine a Liberal as Sir James 
Mackintosh, dismayed at the aspect of Europe, had 
ventured to " not despair of the fortunes of human 
race ; " but was constrained to own that the moral days 
and nights of those mighty revolutions had not yet been 
measured by human intellect ; and to ask, who could 
tell how long that fearful night might be before the 
dawn of a brighter morrow. The race of man might 

* The first verse of Mr. Kingsley's kind of battle hymn, as it has 
been called, of Christian Socialism, " The Day of the Lord," 
ends, — 

" The night is darkest before the morn ; 
When the pain is sorest the child is born, 
And the Day of the Lord is at hand." 



HEAVIXESS FOR A XIGHT. 



reach the promised land ; but he could see no assurance 
that the existing generation would not perish in the 
wilder The cheeriest could at times do little more 

than adopt Kent's patient philosophy — 

" Fortune, good night ; smile once more ; turn thy wheel" 
The more despondently speculative would find at best 
a spokesman in Brutus : — 

" Oh that a man might know 
The end of this day*s business, ere it come ! 

it sufficeth, that the day will end, 
And then the end is known.* 7 

Sir Walter Scott, journalizing day by day, when days 
were at the darkest with him, not only his daily cares 
and cr lit his night thoughts, refers on one occa- 

sion to Susannah in Tristram Shandy, thinking death is 
best met in bed ; and he adds, u I am sure trouble and 
vexation are not. The watches of the night press 
wearily when disturbed by fruitless regrets and disagree- 
able anticipations. But let it pass. 

'• Well, Goodman Time, or blunt, or keen, 
e thou quick, or take thy leisure, 
Longest day will have its e'en, 
Weariest life but treads a measure. ■ 

Come ! exclaims Byron's Doge of Venice : " The hour 
may be a hard one, but 'twill end." Some kind of end, 
. even-tiling earthly has, and must have. 
Cleve's haggard craft-men, in Mr. Browning's play, 

tarve now, and will lie down at night to starve, 
of a like to-morrow — but as sure 
st unlike morrow-after-tl 

Since end things must, end I 

f /'//<• wh< . and whose prayer, is the Psalmist's, 

t me hear Thy lovingkindness betimes in the 

morning, for in Thee is my tr There is a prologue 

i perils by waters, in which we 



32 NEXT MORNING'S CHEERY CALM. 

hear the elder Leader's calm reply, in steady accents 
given, " In man's most dark extremity, oft succour 
dawns from Heaven." The closing stanza of Burns's 
Welcome home to Nithsdale is pitched in the same 
key : — 

" Though stars in skies may disappear, and angry tempests gather, 
The happy hour may soon be near that brings us pleasant weather ; 
The weary night of care and grief may have a joyful morrow : 
So dawning day has brought relief — Farewell our night of sorrow." 

We read of Charles I., and his first night at Caris- 
brook Castle, that "his terrors were gradually appeased," 
when, next morning, on rising, he contemplated from the 
windows of his prison the charming view which the sea 
and land presented from that spot, and had breathed 
the inspiriting air of dawn. Scott tells us of the Master 
of Ravenswood at Wolf's Crag, how his agitations of 
the previous night found a composing and sedative 
influence in the morning that dispelled the shades of 
darkness, and was favourable to calm reflection.* There 
is nothing more strange, but nothing more certain, Mr. 
Disraeli affirms, than the different influences which the 
seasons of night and day exercise upon the moods of 
our minds. " Him whom the moon sends to bed with a 
head full of misty meaning, the sun will summon in the 
morning with a brain clear and lucid as his beam. Twi- 
light makes us pensive ; Aurora is the goddess of ac- 
tivity. Despair curses at midnight : Hope blesses at 
noon.-" Prospero's words in the Tempest admit of pre- 
sent adaptation : 

*At a later crisis in the sombre narrative, we read how old Caleb 
Balderstone thought that the morning, for which he longed, would 
never dawn ; " but time, whose course rolls with equal current, 
however it may seem more rapid or more slow to mortal apprehen- 
sion, brought the dawn at last, and spread a ruddy light on the 
broad verge of the glittering ocean." 



GLOOM-DISPELLIXG DAWN. 33 

"And as the morning steals upon the night, 
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses 
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle 
Their clearer reason.'' 

Mr. Trollopc cautions us, in behalf of one of his heroes, 
that the character of a man is not to be judged from the 
reveries and vagaries of his solitary hours in the dark : 
" I beg, therefore, that Mr. Belton may be regarded 
and criticised in accordance with his conduct on the 
following morning." It is the exception with wretched- 
ness so exceptional as that of Roderick, the last of the 
Goths, to whom, after " oh, what a night of waking 
horrors ! " nor when morning came 

" Did the realities of light and day 
Bring aught of comfort." 

The exception proves the rule. And the rule holds 
good, especially of the young. Of one of the plea- 
santest of her young people, always pleasant Miss 
Austen observes, that to youth and natural cheerfulness 
like hers t though under temporary gloom at night, the 
return of clay will hardly fail to bring return of spirits. 
The youth and cheerfulness of morning, says this author, 
are in happy analogy, and of powerful operation ; and if 
the distress be not poignant enough to keep the eyes 
unclosed, they will be sure to open to sensations of 
softened pain and brighter hope. 

*• Fair unto all men, shining Morning, seems 
'I'lr. tie when a new day unrolls, 

And all old sights and long-enduivd doles 

sh and bearable in thy bright beams." 

Contracting night thoughts and sensations with morn- 

, the American Professor at the Breakfast-table 

"our old mother Nature," that when she follows 

US upstairs to our beds in her suit of black velvet and 

diamonds, every creak of her sandalled shootl and every 

D 



34 HEAVINESS MAY LAST FOR A NIGHT, 

whisper of her lips is full of mystery and fear ; but she has 
pleasant and cheery tones enough for us when she comes 
in her dress of blue and gold over the eastern hill-tops. 
Oft, in the night, in imagining some fear, how easy (as 
Theseus has it) is a bush supposed a bear ! But early 
sunshine has a spell to changer tout cela. Madame de 
StaeTs Oswald shuts himself up in his room, his first 
night in the capital of Christendom, a prey to dejection : 
" Oswald awoke in Rome. The dazzling sun of Italy 
met his first gaze, and his soul was penetrated with sen- 
sations of .love and gratitude to that Heaven which 
seemed to smile on him in those glorious beams." Heavi- 
ness had endured for the night, but joy was first comer 
with the early morning. One of Mr. Dickens's auto- 
biographic heroes opens a chapter with the words, " Morn- 
ing made a considerable difference * in my general 
prospect of Life, and brightened it so much that it 
scarcely seemed the same." With morning the vexed 
question of the laureate's Two Voices takes another form 
altogether, — as the vexed questioner arises and releases 
the casement, and the light grows " with freshness in the 
dawning east ; " and by the time he is in the fields, 
Nature's living motion lends "the pulse of hope to dis- 
content;" he wonders at the bounteous hours, the slow 
result of winter showers : you scarce could see the grass 
for flowers. 

" I wondered, while I paced along : 
The woods were filled so full with song, 
There seemed no room for sense of wrong." 

Insomuch that, possessed with the joy that had thus 
dawned with day, he marvelled how the mind was 

* Cowper tells us, of the effect of his brother's visit to him in 
July, 1764, that he rose the next morning a new creature — a thou- 
sand delirious delusions dispersed. 



BUT JOY COMETH IN THE MORNING. 35 

brought to anchor by one gloomy thought, — as his, so 
signally, yestreen. 

" The morning comes, of health so prodigal, 

I feel that health must on my being beam ; 

And the blue sky absorbs each dreary dream. 

The flowers invite me to a festival." 

There is an influence in the light of morning that 
tends, says Hawthorne, to rectify whatever errors of 
fancy, or even of judgment, we may have taken up 
during the sun's decline, or among the shadows of the 
night, or in the less wholesome glow of moonshine. The 
common experience is that of the poet of the Three 
Gates — 

" Then, at morn, methinks the moan parted with the parting gloom. 
And a softer, happier tone breathed around thy quiet room." 

Cheerily ! cheerily ! is Barry Cornwall's refrain — there 

is still a spot of green whence the heavens may be seen. 

And 

" Let us never greet despair, 
While the little spot is there ; 
For Winter brighteneth into May, 
And sullen Night to sunny Day; 
So cheerily, cheerily ! " 

The long lane has its turning, the longest day its 
night. Be it a long day of toil, for one that has to bear 
the burden and heat of it, and therefore looks on wist- 
fully for the cool and the repose of eventide ; or be it a 
rless night of prolonged suffering, dabit 
Dcus his quoque finetn. 

the clay never so long, 
At length cometh even-song." 

So saith the ancient rhyme. And then eve saddens into 

And then — "Watchman, what of the night 3 

bman, what of the night? The watchman saith. 

The morning cometh." 

e what cheer you may, 
Qg that never finds the day." 



IV. 

CAMP FESTIVITIES AND MARTIAL BRAG. 

i Kings xx. ii ; i Samuel xxx. 16, 17. 

THE king of Israel proved himself a match for the 
king of Syria in words, as well as in action, when, 
before defeating him with great slaughter, he gave this 
reply to Benhadad's arrogant presumption of an easy 
triumph : " Let not him that girdeth on his harness 
boast himself as he that putteth it off." Benhadad was 
drinking, he and the kings in the pavilions, when this 
message reached him ; and at once he bade his forces 
set themselves in array against the city he assumed to 
be a taken city. And they did so. The hours wore 
away ; and at noon Benhadad was drinking himself 
drunk in the pavilions, he and the kings, the thirty and 
two kings that helped him. Was a detachment of the 
enemy in sight ? Whether they be come out for peace 
or for war, take them alive. But ail at once all was 
confusion, and the Syrians fled, and Israel pursued 
them, and Benhadad escaped on horseback all in hot 
haste, and the king of Israel smote his horses and 
chariots, and slew the Syrians with a great slaughter. 
The king of Syria had feasted and tippled with reckless 
bravado up to the last moment ; and no doubt he was 
assured enough of a signal victory to prepare before 
hand a camp banquet to celebrate it the moment it 
should be won. Camp banquets/ however, are liable to 
sudden collapse, in all their stages. David came upon 
the Amalekites when they were "eating and drinking, 
and dancing, because of all the great spoil that they had 
taken out of the land of the Philistines, and out of the 



VICTORY PRESUMPTUOUSLY PRESUMED. 

land of Judah. And David smote them from the twi- 
light even unto the evening of the next day ; . 
and David recovered all that the Amalekites had carried 
away." The eating and drinking and dancing were as 
inopportune with them as with the worldlings before the 
flood, when the flood came and swept them all away. 
Benhadad's brag was in effect, as in volume and force of 
delivery, an asinine bray. His tall talk was all talk. 
He should have postponed both boast and banquet. In 
respect of both, even so poor a creature as Ahab had 
him on the hip. Benhadad's brag was made the anvil 
for Ahab's wit ; and the banquet may have had a good 
deal to do with the brag. 

When Pausanias, after the battle of Plataea, took 
possession of the tent of Mardonius, which had formerly 

:i that of Xerxes, he directed the oriental slaves who 
had escaped the massacre to prepare a banquet after the 

:ion of the Persians, and as if served to Mardonius. 
His object was to contrast this gorgeous feast with the 

Lrtan repast that was to be served at the same time ; 
but he must have relished also the irony of fate in thus 
dis] f the materials of luxury, designed to com- 

memorate conquest, and applied in the event to cele- 
brate defeat. He was not the man to have forgotten 
the marble which the Persians brought with them to 
Marathon, to be erected into a tropin- of the victory 
they counted upon, and which was, at a later period, 

■ light by Phidias into a statue of Nemesis. Upon the 
taking of Pompey's camp at Pharsalia, there was what 
Plutarch calls a spectacle which showed in strong 
colours the vanity and presumption of Pompey's troops 

— all the tent> were crowned with myrtle ; the couches 

were Strewed with flowers, the tables covered with 

. and flagon^ of wine set <>ut. M To Mich a 



38 CAMP FESTIVITIES 

degree had their vain hopes corrupted them, and with 
such an insensate confidence they took the field." In a 
like spirit the old biographer comments on the pre- 
sumption of Pyrrhus when attacking Laced aemon — the 
contemptuous idea he had conceived of it being the 
principal thing that saved the city ; for, assuming that 
he must needs prove irresistible, he ordered his tents 
to be pitched, and sat quietly down, while the house 
of his ally Cleonymus was duly adorned and prepared 
for a festal supper to be enjoyed with Pyrrhus that 
evening. 

After the battle of Pollentia we see the captive wife 
of Alaric, who had impatiently claimed his promise of 
Roman jewels and patrician handmaids, reduced to 
implore the mercy of the insulting foe. Claudian pic- 
tures her an arrogantly exacting petitioner, before the 
battle :— 

" Demens Ausonidum gemmata monilia matrum, 
Romanasque alta famulas cervice petebat." 

History offers many such side-scenes as that of Clodion 
encamped in the plains of Artois, and celebrating, " with 
vain and ostentatious security," a nuptial feast that was 
interrupted by the unexpected and unwelcome presence 
of ^Etius, who had passed the Somme at the head of his 
light cavalry ; when the tables, which had been spread 
under the shelter of a hill, alongside the banks of a 
pleasant stream, were rudely overturned ; the Franks 
were " oppressed," in Gibbon's phrase, not to say sup- 
pressed, before they could recover their arms or their 
ranks, and their loaded wagons afforded a rich booty, 
besides what was ready to hand, and to mouth, on the 
festal board. 

Against Belisarius advanced the Mirrhanes of Persia, 
with forty thousand of his best troops ; and with all 



AXD MARTIAL BRAG. 



becoming emphasis he signified the day and the hour 
on which the citizens of Dura should prepare a bath for 
his refreshment after the toils of victory. Could he be 
said to be reckoning without his host, with such a host 
as those forty thousand elect ? But host, like hostis, 
admits of divers and diverse meanings ; and he was 
reckoning without Belisarius. 

At Bannockburn was taken prisoner by Bruce one 
Baston, a Carmelite friar, and by repute an excellent 
poet, who had been commanded by Edward II. to 
accompany the English army, that he might immortalize 
the expected triumph of his master. The appropriate 
ransom for him demanded by Bruce was, that he should 
celebrate the victory of the Scots instead — a task which 
he accomplished in a composition said to remain as an 
extraordinary relic of the Leonine, or rhyming hexa- 
meters. Edward's premature prevision is of the kind 
the Emperor Ferdinand II. indulged in, when, deeming 
himself absolutely sure of his sun's election by the diet, 
he let the imperial laureate not only write but print a 

itulatory ode ; whereas, to his surprise and con- 
fusion, the diet, instead of unequivocal submission, met 
him with remonstrance and reproach and a list of in- 
s u (W rab 1 e g rievanc e s. 

Of Hohenlo's attack upon the city of Bois-le-duc, in 

Mr. Motley tells us, that "very brutally, foolishly, 
and characteristically, he had promised his followers the 
sacking of the city as soon as it should be taken " — and 
they accordingly set about the sacking before it 
taken, and with what unlooked-for result. With 
ret the same historian has elsewhere to admit, 
that not only the reckless Hohenlo, but the all-accom- 
plished Sainte Aldegonde, committed the gravest error ; 
both of them, in the instant of presumed triumph, 
giving way to puerile exultation. And he relates how 



4o HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 

both these commanders, " with a celerity as censurable 
as it seems incredible," sprang into the first barge that 
floated across the dyke, now pierced (at the action on 
the Kowenstyn, during the great siege of Antwerp), in 
order that they might, in person, carry the news of the 
victory to Antwerp, and set all the bells ringing and 
the bonfires blazing ; and how, while the conquerors 
were thus gone to enjoy their triumph, the conquered, 
so far from being as yet disposed to accept their defeat, 
were even ignorant that they were defeated. A mag- 
nificent banquet, however, was duly spread in the town- 
house to greet the exultant Hohenlo ; and he, " placed 
on high at the head of the banquet-table, assumed the 
very god of war." He drained huge goblets to the 
health of Antwerp's fairest dames who sat beside him 
and near him; and as he drank and feasted, the trumpet, 
kettle-drum, and cymbal, and merry peal of bells with- 
out, did honour to his feat. " So gay and gallant was 
the victor, that he announced another banquet for the 
following day, still further to celebrate the happy release 
of Antwerp, and invited the fair ladies around him again 
to grace the board.'"' Nevertheless, the gentlewoman 
next to him sighed forth a misgiving that the morrow 
would scarcely be so joyous as the present day had been, 
and could not refrain from expressing her earnest appre- 
hensions that the triumph was premature. Hardly had 
she spoken, the story goes, when sinister sounds were 
heard in the streets : the first few stragglers, survivors 
of the deadly fight, had arrived with the fatal news that 
all was lost, the dyke regained, the Spaniards victorious, 
the whole band of patriots cut to pieces. " A few fright- 
fully wounded and dying sufferers were brought into the 
banqueting-hall. Hohenlo sprang from the feast — inter- 
rupted in so ghastly a manner — pursued by shouts and 
hisses." No wonder that howls of execration saluted 



OF PREMATURE TRIUMPH. 41 

him outside, and that he was obliged to conceal himself 
for a time, to escape the fury of the populace. 

Hearty in its dry way is the chuckle Anthony- 
Wood enjoys in one passage of his Diary about the 
" parliament soldiers " and their discomfiture at Oxford 
in 1645 : " On the day before some of the said rebels 
. . had been progging For venison in Thame park, 
I think, and one or two pasties of it were made, and 
• put into the oven before the cavaliers entered into 
the house. But so it was that none of the said rebels 
were left at eleven of the clock to eat the same pasties/ 1 
which fell into other hands and were appreciated accord- 
ingly. 

lonel Rigby's pride is well said to have had a 

dramatic fall when His mortar was captured by the 

garrison, on the very day on which he had invited his 

friends in the neighbourhood to come and see Lathom 

-e fired. 

When the British squadron, doomed to an ignominious 

repulse, appeared before Carthagena, in 1 74 1, the first 

step of the officers on board was to hold a Council of 

War, in order to settle the distribution of their future 

(paulo-post-future) booty ; or, as Earl Stanhope suggests, 

the fable, sell the skin of the living bear. 

At that triumph of Prussian discipline, as .Mr. Carlyle 

accounts it, the battle of Mollwitz (1741), Xeipperg and 

Vustrians, running out to rank themselves, cried, 

>up hot a little, till we drive these fellows 

Struction "■ — SO contemptuous were the Imperialists 

of l'i >ldiering. Hut the soup got very cold in- 

re that came about. And the opinion is one 

which old Fritz's historian assumes them to have re- 

noun< r since noon that day, for all remaining 

irs. 

eral Hawley, before leaving Edinburgh to fight 



42 HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS 

(and lose) the battle of Falkirk, had erected two gibbets 
whereon to hang the Highlanders who should surrender 
to him in the victory he expected to achieve. After he 
returned, as Dr. Chambers says, " in a state so different 
from that of a conqueror/'' he had to use these con- 
spicuous monuments of his folly for the hanging of some 
of his own men. At the time of the fatal reverse at 
Culloden, Lovat was residing at Gortuleg, and the 
house had, on the day of the battle, been the scene of 
" extensive culinary operations," for the purpose of 
celebrating by a feast the victory which it was expected 
the Prince would gain over his enemies. The French 
officer, on the Prince's side, who figures in Addison's 
Freeholder, amuses himself during the first day's march, 
after Preston, with considering what post he shall accept 
under James the Third, and absolutely determines not to 
be fobbed off with a garter ; passing by a noble country 
seat, of Whig ownership, he resolves to beg it, and 
pleases himself, the remainder of the day, with several 
alterations he intends to make in it. " We were indeed 
so confident of success, that I found most of my fellow- 
soldiers were taken up with imaginations of the same 
nature." There had like to have been, for instance, a 
duel between two subalterns upon a dispute, which of 
them should be governor of Portsmouth. In short, 
every man had cut out a place for himself in his own 
thoughts ; so that there might be reckoned up in that 
little army two or three lord treasurers, half a dozen 
secretaries of state, and at least a score of lords-justices 
in Eyre, for each side of Trent. 

Napoleon in 1804, projecting and practically dis- 
counting his great invasion and subjugation of these 
isles, directed M. Derion, then at the head of the French 
mint, to prepare a medal in commemoration of the 
assured conquest. The die, being made accordingly, 



OF PREMATURE TRIUMPH. 43 

was ready to be used in London, but owing", as Pitt's 
latest and ablest biographer remarks, to u the course of 
events," it was subsequently broken. Only three medals 
struck from it now remain, it is said ; one of them in 
England, which is described as bearing on one side the 
usual head of the Emperor crowned with laurel, while 
on the reverse Hercules appears lifting up and crushing 
in his arms the monster Antaeus ; the motto being 
Descents md below in smaller letters 

Frappc a Londres en 1804. 

Five years later we have Soult printing a procla- 
mation at his head-quarters, addressed to the generals of 

•ns, and to be published as an order of the day, in 
which he announced himself King of Portugal and 
Algarves, subject only to the approval of the Emperor, 
of which he entertained no doubt. The printer's ink 
had not had much more than about time to dry, when 

igton achieved the passage of the Douro, and 
effected so complete a surprise that, at four o'clock that 
day he quietly sat down to the dinner and table-service 
which had been prepared for Marshal Soult 

Such was the confidence which the people of Boston 
felt, in 18 13, as to the success of Captain Lawrence of 
the Chesapeake, when starting to fight the Shannon, 
that they had prepared a public supper to greet the 
victors on their return, with their prisoners, to the 

>ur. Thi the naval action which has been 

■bed as so rapid, that fifteen minutes only elapsed 

from tile time the first gun was fired to that of the entire 

ry of the Chesapeake by the British. Kihaya 

live thousand Turks at Valtezza were so 

confident ofsuccej rreeks, that the soldiers 

had performed military dances in the streets of Tripo- 

:e setting tnit, in assurance of antedated victory. 
The topsy-turvy 1 that occur on some of these 



44 FATAL PROSPERITY. 

occasions are of a kind to resemble what Shakspeare's 
Capulet piteously describes : — 

" All things that we ordained festival, 
Turn from their office to black funeral: 
Our instruments, to melancholy bells, . . . 
And all things change them to the contrary." 



V. 
FATAL PROSPERITY. 

Proverbs i. 32. 

PROSPERITY, in perhaps a quite equal degree with 
adversity, is a test of character ; tries it, tempts 
it, and is very often too much for it. "The prosperity 
of fools shall destroy them." And the prosperity of 
those who until they became too prosperous were 
accounted wise too often brings out the folly that 
underlay the wisdom, and the weed-like growth of folly 
chokes the wisdom, so that it becometh unfruitful, and 
here again prosperity is fatal. 

Lord Macaulay's highly finished portrait of Charles 
Montague, whose career had been, till fortune turned, 
more splendidly and uninterruptedly successful than 
that of any other member of the House of Commons, 
since the House of Commons had begun to exist, in- 
cludes this characteristic trait, — that with all his ability, 
he had not the wisdom to avert, by suavity and modera- 
tion, that curse, the inseparable concomitant of pros- 
perity and glory, which the ancients personified under 
the name of Nemesis. " His head, strong for all the 
purposes of debate and arithmetical calculation [as First 
Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer], 
was weak against the intoxicating influence of success 



DEMORALIZED BY SUCCESS. 



and fame." He became proud even to insolence. And 
as great wealth, suddenly acquired, is not often enjoyed 
with moderation, dignity, and good taste, there may 
have been some ground for the wild stories told against 
him, by the " crowd of libellers who assailed him with 
much more than political hatred, laying to his charge 
boundless rapacity and corruption ; to say nothing of the 
rash and arrogant phrases that were imputed to him, and 
perhaps invented for him/'* Scott illustrates in the 
person of Martin Waldeck how little mortals can foresee 
the effect of sudden prosperity on their own disposition : 
the evil propensities in his nature, which poverty had 
checked and repressed, ripened and bore their unhallowed 
fruit under the influence of temptation and the means of 
indulgence. "As deep calls unto deep, one bad passion 
awakened another ; — the fiend of avarice invoked that 
of pride, and pride was to be supported by cruelty 
and oppression." YValdeck's character, always bold and 
daring, was thus rendered harsh and assuming by pros- 
perity, and he soon became odious accordingly to all 
ranks, and destruction was his doom, Rousseau impres- 
sively says that " Celui que sa puissance met au-dessus 
de 1'homme doit etre au-dessus des faiblesses del'human- 
ite, sans quoi cet execs de force ne servira qu'a le mettre 
en effet au-dessous des autres et de ce qu'il cut etc lui- 
menie s'il fut reste leur egal." When Cyrus had annexed 
to his dominions the great and rich province of Babylon, 
he seems to have become, on the showing of Herodotus, 
intoxicated with success ; the measure of his prosperity 

* In a later chapter of his History, Macaulay contrasts Somers 
with Montague under the test of prosperity. u One of the most 

.re trials to which the head and heart of man can be put is great 

that trial both Montague and Somers 
put It was too much for Montague. But Somers was found 
day. History of England) ch. ocv. 



46 MAN'S PERIL IN PROSPERITY, 

was full to the brim, and it now began to run over in 
insolent self-confidence. From the time of the battle of 
Plataea a remarkable change was noted in Pausanias : 
glory had made him arrogant, and sudden luxury osten- 
tatious ; the inscription he caused to be graven on a 
golden tripod claimed as exclusively his own the con- 
quest of the barbarians. Of course Plutarch is as free 
to point a moral from Romulus as from Pyrrhus or 
Sylla ; of Romulus accordingly he tells us, that after 
the last of his wars he seemed over-exalted by his 
exploits, dropping his previous affability, and assuming 
the monarch to an offensive degree. Pyrrhus is similarly 
described as elated with prosperity, and carrying matters 
with a high hand. " This was not the conduct which he 
had observed at first ; for then he was gracious and 
affable to an extreme," whereas now he turned from a 
popular prince into a tyrant. In the case of Sylla, 
Plutarch speaks of him as bearing prosperity with great 
moderation at the beginning. Si sic semper ! But the 
eventual change in him " could not but cast a blemish 
upon power " — as though the effect of it were a malign- 
antly constant quantity, quod semper, quod ubique, quod 
in omnibus demonstrandum est ; for, " on his account it 
was believed that high honours and fortunes will not 
suffer men's manners to remain in their original sim- 
plicity, but that the result is insolence, arrogance, and 
inhumanity." Whether power does really produce such 
a change of disposition, or whether it only displays the 
native badness of the heart, is a vexed question which 
Plutarch refers to another section of authorship, or defers 
to a more convenient season. But his opinion is perhaps 
indicated in the Life of Aratus, when he says of the 
Philip against whom that patriot had to contend, " He 
was carried so high by the tide of prosperity, as to dis- 
cover many disorderly passions. The native badness of 



LEST HE BECOME TOO PROUD: 47 



his disposition broke through the veil he had worn over 
it, and by degrees his real character appeared." Dr. 
Thomas Brown duly discusses the metaphysical argu- 
ment against the identity of the mind, which some have 
drawn from the occasional striking contrasts of character 
in the same individual at different periods of life, or 
when, by great changes of fortune, he may have been 
placed suddenly in circumstances remarkably different. 
Gibbon describes the Emperor Cams, who before his 
elevation was in esteem for virtue and worth, as allowing 
his austere temper to degenerate into moroseness and 
cruelty ; and Constantine, who had so long inspired his 
subjects with love, as "degenerating into a cruel and 
dissolute monarch, corrupted by fortune, or raised by 
conquest above the necessity of dissimulation." Maxi- 
mus the philosopher, the same historian describes as 
insensibly corrupted by his position at the court of 
Julian : " his dress became more splendid, his demeanour 
more lofty," and a " very scandalous " acquisition of 
wealth was imputed to him. Gratian, among the 
Emperors, is another of Gibbon's warning examples ; 
while upon Theodosius he has this "singular commenda- 
tion " to pass, that his virtues seemed always to expand 
with his fortune, the season of his prosperity being that 
of his moderation. Such a history as that of Suetonius, 
which gives a succession of absolute princes, Addison 
takes to be an unanswerable argument against despotic 
power. Look, he says, into that historian, or into any 
ies of absolute princes, how man)' tyrants must you 
read through before you come at one that is supportable. 
But this is not all, the Spectator goes on to say: an 
honest private man often grows cruel and abandoned 
wh 1 into an absolute prince ; for, give a 

man power of doing what he pleases with impunity, you 
lish his fear and consequently overturn in him 



48 RUINED BY POWER. 

one of the pillars of morality. " This too we find con- 
firmed by matter of fact. How many hopeful heirs- 
apparent * to great empires, when in the possession of 
them, have become such monsters of lust and cruelty 
as are a reproach to human nature ! " Vertigo, in Lord 
Lytton's Siege of Constantinople, draws sweeping conclu- 
sions on the verdict of experience and history : 

" Alas, that in this world 'tis ever so ! 
For men might be as gods, if it were not 
That greed of power goes mad from power got. 
Who stands upon the pinnacle, as 'twere, 
Of Greatness, — seeing, hearing, everywhere, 
About himself the dazzling orb spin round, 
Turns dizzy at the sight and at the sound, 
And tumbles from the top to the abyss. 
Of all high places this the danger is : — 
That those who stand there needs must gaze beneath, 
Till they were desperate ; being wooed to death 
By depth." 

An Old Man essayist quotes the old saying, as old as 
Aristotle, and older, that those who rise suddenly to 
wealth and rank are not such good masters as those who 
have them by a long line of ancestors. " In my own 
experience I never yet knew a man who had raised him- 
self in the world, or, if you like, had been raised more 
by lucky circumstances than by his own merit, who was 
not spoiled by it." The story of Nicolo de Rienzi has 
a standard moral on the effect of power. Singular, as 
Petrarch asserts in the Pentameron of Landor, was the 
prudence that last of the tribunes manifested at first ; 
while his modesty, his piety, his calm severity, his un- 
biassed justice, won to him the affections of every good 

* Mr. Tennyson has this parenthetic simile in Idylls of the 
King: 

" As sons of kings, loving in pupilage, 
Have turn'd to tyrants when they came to power." 

Vivien. 



RIENZI; MASANIELLOj XERO. 49 

citizen. He might have become the master of Italy, 
had he continued the master of himself; but he "al- 
lowed the weakest of the passions to run away with 
him : he fancied he could not inebriate himself soon 
enough with the intemperance of power." His best 
apologist is free to aver that the calmness, the sagacity, 
the sanctitude of Rienzi, in the ascent to his elevation, 
rendered him only the more detestable for his abuse of 
power. Surely the man was mad, Boccaccio charitably 
sug. And his companion replies, that men often 

• the hand to the madness that seizes them. Rienzi, 
he takes it, yielded to pride and luxury ; behind them 
came jealousy and distrust : fear followed these, and 
cruelty followed fear : — then the intellects sought the 
subterfuge that bewildered them ; and an ignoble flight 

precluded by an ignominious death. 

Masaniello again — whose sudden and giddy 
elevation was aided by special circumstances therewith 

perant, to turn his brain, and who all too soon 

became capricious, absurd, and cruel, though cruelty is 

affirmed to have been a vice seemingly foreign to his 

But was it not seemingly foreign to that of 

> himself, once upon a time ? A philosophical 
inquirer observes of that emperor, that in early youth, a 
cultivator of the softest arts, and no cause of suspicion 
and terror yet maddening his restless imagination, he 
:icere when, the sentence on a criminal 
beii: ht to him to sign, he exclaimed, piteouf 

'em n esc ire lit eras ! — " Would to Heaven that I had 

learned to write ! " But the same susceptibility to 

immediate influences which, when fresh from the contem- 

rene and harmless images, made him impul- 

iful, subjugated him to sensual pleasu; 

until his fears were worked upon by conscious enervation 

and thus " the Voluptuous tritler v. 



So THE CHANGE IN NERO, ROBESPIERRE, 

scared into the relentless butcher." Racine's Albine can 
say of Nero, ere yet his potentiality of wickedness has 
asserted itself in all or any of its real breadth and 
depth and length and height, — 

" Depuis trois ans entiers qu'a-t-il dit, qu'a-t-il fait 
Qui ne promette a Rome un empereur parfait ? 
Rome, depuis trois ans par ses soins gouverne'e, 
Au temps de ses consuls croit etre retournee : 
II la gouverne en pere. Enfin, Neron naissant 
A toutes les vertus d'Auguste vieillissant." 

That is in the first act of the tragedy of Britannicus. 
But tragedies have their fourth and fifth acts, and by the 
time we near the end of the fourth act of this tragedy, 
even a French one, true to the rule of unity of time, 
mark the change. Burrhus is now the speaker, and to 
Nero he speaks : 

" Ah ! des vos premiers ans l'heureuse experience 
Vous fait-elle, seigne'ur, hair votre innocence ? 

. . . Quel changement, oh dieux ! 
Le sang le plus abject vous etait pre'cieux. 
Un jour, il m'en souvient, le senat equitable 
Vous pressait de souscrire a la mort d'un coupable ; 
Vous resistiez, seigneur, a leur severite ; 
Votre cceur s'accusait de trop de cruaute ; 
Et plaignant les malheurs attaches a l'empire, 
Je voudrais, disiez-vous, ne savoir pas ecrire." 

Marat boasts in his memoirs that as a boy he could not 
bear the sight of any ill-treatment of any of his fellow- 
creatures, just as the young man Robespierre had a 
young Nero-like horror of blood-shedding ; or as Couthon 
won all hearts by his gentle melancholy, though seeming 
to live only for his wife and child. " The inhabitants of 
St. Amand," says Lamartine, " little suspected the future 
role of Couthon : no blood was yet visible in his dreams." 
Of Lebon, too, like Robespierre a native of Arras, the 
historian of the Girondins has this to say, that after 
acquiring in obscurity the name of a man of worth, in 






LEBOX, BARE RE, COM MODI'S. 51 

the day of his power, — and it was the power of darkness, 
— he made himself notorious for the pitilessness of his 
proscriptions. " Blood, of which he had had a horror, 
became as water in his eyes." He seemed to repent of 
his sometime humanity, as of a blameworthy weakness. 
Of Barere it is that Macaulay remarks, in perhaps the 
most scathing and relentless of all his essays, that a man 
who, having been blessed by nature with a bland dispo- 
sition, gradually brings himself to inflict misery on his 
fellow-creatures with indifference, with satisfaction, and 
at length with a hideous rapture, deserves to be regarded 
as a portent of wickedness. Barere he describes as 
tasting blood, and feeling no loathing ; tasting it again, 
and liking it well ; cruelty becoming with him, first a 
habit, then a passion, and at last a madness: so complete 
and rapid was the degeneracy of his nature, that, within 
a very few months after the time when he had passed for 
a good-natured man, he had brought himself to look on 
the despair and misery of his fellow-creatures with a glee 
Ming that of the fiends whom Dante saw watching 
the pool of seething pitch in Malebolge. As Nero, so 
Commodus, among the Caesars, is a type for all time ol 

.ed development : he had, says Gibbon, displayed 
ity of sentiment which might perhaps have 

d into solid virtue. "Commodus was not, as he 

nted, a tiger born with an insatiate 

thirst of human bloo 1." But of depraved development 

ties and are (jU(.\\< 

. hilt- Norman Tancred in Salerno reign 
'I he title of a gracious prince he gained ; 

Till turned a tyrant in his latter d 

He lost I t ln^ former pr 

And from the bright meridian where he ^tood, 
pped lii> hands in lovers' blood." 

nding, -fact/is descensus. Ea y as lying, in Ham- 
let's phrase, is the process of degradation, down, down 



52 DEPRAVATION OF CHARACTER. 

down to the terminus ad quern, when a man systemati- 
cally hath left off to behave himself wisely and to do 
good. 

Caroline Montfort, in the last of the Caxton fictions, is 
aghast at the change alleged to have come over one she 
had seen in youth, when nothing about him foreboded 
" so fearful a corruption." " He might be vain, extrava- 
gant, selfish, false . . . but still the ruffian you paint, 
banded with common criminals, cannot be the same as 
the gay, dainty, perfumed, fair-faced adventurer " in 
question. Do we know ourselves, or what good or evil 
circumstances may bring from us ? muses the author of 
The Newcomes. " Did Cain know, as he and his younger 
brother played round their mother's knee, that the little 
hand which caressed AbePshould one day grow larger, and 
seize a brand to slay him ? Thrice fortunate he, to whom 
circumstance is made easy : whom fate visits with gentle 
trial, and kindly Heaven keeps out of temptation." Even 
Zeluco, his author assures us, was not naturally cruel, 
but became so " in consequence of unlimited power/'' 
Penn pleads for Cromwell, in the imaginary conversation 
with Lord Peterborough, that whereas he was thought to 
have been a hypocrite for the sake of power, he was 
really sincere until power by degrees made him a hypo- 
crite ; whence the moral, how little then of it should be 
trusted to any man, when the wisest, and the bravest, and 
the calmest are thus perverted by it. 

Swift is suggestive about the "known story of Colonel 
Tidcomb," who, while he continued a subaltern, was every 
day complaining against the pride, oppression, and hard 
treatment of colonels towards their officers ; but who, in 
a minute after he had received his commission for a 
regiment, confessed to a friend with whom he was walk- 
ing on the Mall, that the spirit of colonelship was coming 
fast upon him ; which spirit is said to have daily increased 



SPOILED BY SUCCESS. 53 

to the hour of his death. Paul Louis Courier says bitterly 
of Lariboissiere, " I followed a General whom I had long 
known for a good man and a friend, and I believed him 
such for ever ; but he became a Count. What a meta- 
morphosis ! The good man instantly disappeared, and 
of the friend I saw no more." " I could never have 
believed, but for this proof, how vast a difference there is 
between a man and a lord.'' Johnson used latterly to 
own of his diligent imitator, Dr. Hawkesworth, whom he 
was fond of, that, setting out a modest, humble man, — 
and originally in trade, — he was " one of the many whom 
success in the world had spoiled." Pope's Sir Balaam is 
a high-coloured representative man of the worst kind of 
spoiling — for Satan now is wiser than of yore, and tempts 
by making rich, not making poor — in the outset a plain 
good man, religious, punctual, frugal, and so forth, whose 
word would pass for more than he was worth ; in the 
outcome, secured by the demon who made his full descent 
in one abundant shower of cent, per cent. Not even the 
Holy Father is, as such, exempt from the historical law 
of depraved development, due to, at least ensuing upon, 
prosperity and place and power in excelsis. Bartolomeo 
Prignani, elected Pope in 1378, was in repute for piety 
as well as learning ; but the cardinals had not, says 

mondi, "calculated on the development of the passions 
which a sudden elevation sometimes gives," or on the 

ree of impatience, arrogance, and irritability of which 
man is capable, in his unexpected capacity of master, 
though in an inferior situation he had appeared gentle 
and modest. This was Urban VI. And what do we 

d in Chronicles and Characters of a later and more 
distinguished pontiff, erst the pauper priest, John Peter 
Carafa? At his election, the whole world cried, " 'TlS 
well, for he is worthy of the keys : "—simple, austere, 
men knew him, pure his name, and noted his virtues, so 



54 MALEVOLENT GESTICULATION. 

that " worthier Pope there could not be/' But as Pope, 
Paul IV. became a byword for luxurious living and 
sumptuous ostentation. The Venetian envoy Bernardo 
Navigero's Relazione has been pungently paraphrased : 

" Good cheer he loves : and lustily he eats 

And deep he drinks : right royal is his tone : 
The mightiest monarchs of the world he treats 

As clots of common dust beneath his throne : 
His daily drink is butts of burning black 

Fierce Naples wine, and cups of Malvoisie. 
Methinks his belly is but a Bacchus' sack ; 

And his least meal meats five-and-twenty be." 



VI. 

MALEVOLENT GESTLCULATLON. 

Proverbs vi. 13; x. 10. 

IT is written of the "naughty person," the wicked 
man, who walketh with a froward mouth, that " he 
winketh with his eyes, he speaketh with his feet, he 
teacheth with his fingers," — all by way of hinting, indi- 
cating, intimating, insinuating the malignant meaning 
that is in his heart, if not upon his lips ; for frowardness 
is in his heart, and he deviseth mischief continually, and 
by these aids and appliances of malevolent gesticulation 
he bringeth that mischief to pass. "He that winketh with 
the eye causeth sorrow." It is an apparent paraphrase 
of this we read in the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach: 
" He that winketh with the eyes worketh evil ; and he 
that knoweth him will depart from him." 

One of the few prose essays contributed by Cowper 
to the Connoisseur concerns " a tell-tale of a very singu- 
lar kind,'"' Ned Trusty by name, who having some sense 
of his duty, hesitates a little in the breach of it ; having 
engaged never to utter a syllable, he must punctually 



MALICE TALKING WITHOUT WORDS. 55 

perform his promise ; but then he has the knack of in- 
sinuating by a nod, and a shrug well-timed, or season- 
able leer, as much as others can convey in express 
terms : it is difficult, in short, to determine whether he 
is more to be admired for his resolution in not mention- 
ing, or his ingenuity in disclosing a secret. Mistress 
Lilias, in Scott's Abbot, presents herself before her 
mistress with all the exterior of one in possession of a 
momentous secret — the corners of her mouth turned 
down, her eves raised up, her lips pressed as fast together 
as if they had been sewed up, to prevent her blabbing, 
and an air of prim mystical importance diffused over 
her whole person and demeanour, which seems to inti- 
mate, " I know something which I am resolved not to 
tell you." In Swift's gallery of portraits of Malice 
always judging worst, he finds room, ample room, for 
some representative personages who do not 

" trust their tongues alone, 
But speak a language of their own ; 
Can read a nod, a shrug, a look, 
Far better than a printed book ; 
Convey a libel in a frown, 
And wink a reputation down ; 
Or by the tossing of the fan 
Describe the lady and the man." 

When Porson's " friend," in the imaginary dialogue, 
Wishes to convey how entirely that scholar is gone to the 
3, he begins by hinting that his faculties are wearing 
away, that he is drinking harder than ever, and that 
although he once indeed had some Greek in his head, — 
" he then claps the forefinger to the side of his n 
tuniN his eye slowly upward, and looks compassionately 
and calmly." Or. Holmes describes two women, in one 
of his initial chapters, as looking each other in the eyes 
with subtle interchange of intelligence, such as belongs 
to their sex in virtue <>f its specialty ; talk without words 



56 MUTE ELOQUENCE OF CALUMNY. 

being half their conversation, just as it is all the conver- 
sation of the lower animals. There is an old lady in 
Land at Last, of whom we are told that she never com- 
promised herself by outraging social decency in verbal 
attacks or disparaging remarks, but whose intimate 
friends had by a long experience been taught to 
thoroughly appreciate, and readily translate, certain 
bits of facial pantomime which never varied ; notably 
among them, the uplifted eyebrow of astonishment, the 
prolonged stare of " wonder at her insolence," the 
shoulder-shrug of " I don't understand such things," 
and the sniff of unmitigated disgust. La Bruyere 
sketches to the life, because from the life, one who 
"vient a ses fins sans se donner la peine d'ouvrir la bpuche : 
on lui parle d'Eudoxe, il sourit ou il soupire : on l'inter- 
roge, on insiste, il ne repond rien, et il a raison ; il en a 
assez dit." For, as George Herbert says, in such a case, 

" What more 

Could poison, if it had a tongue, express?" 

Shakspeare's Leontes is wrathfully disdainful of — 

" The shrug, the hum, or ha ; these pretty brands 
That calumny will use." 

And what significant gesticulation is that described by 
Hubert, to King John, on the part of old men and bel- 
dames in the street, whose talk is dangerous, who shake 
their heads, and whisper one another in the ear, with a 
disproportionate accompaniment of " fearful action " — 
with wrinkling brows, with nods, and rolling eyes. 
Hamlet straitly enjoins his companions of the watch by 
night, on the platform at Elsinore, never by " ambiguous 
giving out " to betray his secret ; never, " with arms en- 
cumbered thus, or this head-shake, or by pronouncing of 
some doubtful phrase, as — Well, well, we know; — or, We 
could an if we would; — or, Lf we list to speak; — or, There 
bc y an if they might;" — or any other such vague intimation 



NOD AND SHRUG, HUM AND HA. 57 

of restrained knowledge, to pique curiosity and to suggest 
a mystery. It is because Othello knows, or thinks he 
knows, Iago to be full of love and honesty, and one that 
weighs his words before he gives them breath, that those 
broken ejaculations and fragmentary utterances of his 
about Desdemona so disquiet him: 

" Therefore these stops of thine fright me the more ; 
For such things in a false disloyal knave 
tricks of custom," 

but presumably pregnant with import in honest, honest 
Iago, whose tactics resemble those of the wary wily 
schemers in Crabbe ; "will now a hint convey, and then 
retire, and let the spark awake the lingering fire." To 
apply the words of Byron's Gabor, all this "is mere 
cozenage, or vile equivocation : you well know your 
doubts are certainties to all around you — your looks and 
voice," and an eloquent one too, and full of matter. So 
with Knowles's Ferrado, in The Wife, starting to " mix 
with the company, and point to them the eye of ques- 
tioning remark : with looks speak sentences," — look 
daggers, where he spoke none. Until she came to know 
better, Agnes Grey thought the elder Mrs. Bloomfield a 
kindly old body, disposed to be confidingly confidential, 
though a main portion of her " confidences " appeared 
to consist in noddings and shakings of her head, and 
ticulating with hands and eyes, — her half sentences 
being graphically eked out with "knowing winks" and 
the like effective symbolism of dumb show. .Aurora 
tor>, had her Mrs. Powell, the ensign's widow, 
who murdered character without the utterance of one 
•rd that could have told against her gentility, 
had it been repeated aloud in a crowded drawing-room, 
had only sh her shoulders, and lifted her 

straw-© eyebrows, and sighed, half- regretfully, 

half-deprecatingly ; but she had blasted the char;;' 



58 MALEVOLENT GESTICULATION. 

of the woman she hated as shamefully as if she had 
uttered a libel too gross for Holywell Street/' 
Whispered aloud, is Churchill's cue for a pungent 
parenthesis : 

" Whispered aloud (for this we find 
A custom current with mankind, 
So loud to whisper, that each word 
May all around be plainly heard ; 
And Prudence, sure, would never miss 
A custom so contrived as this 
Her candour to secure, yet aim 
Sure death against another's fame)." 

There are indirect insinuations which convey an asser- 
tion or an argument in its most incisive form } and 
satire is held to be always most delicate, and often most 
cutting, when it is rather hinted than expressed. 

Samuel Butler describes in Hudibras the proper 
language of cabals, where all a subtle statesman says — 

"Is half in words, and half in face ; 
As Spaniards talk in dialogues 
Of head and shoulders, nods and shrugs ; 
Entrust it under solemn vows 
Of mum and silence and the rose, 
To be retailed again in whispers, 
For th' easy credulous to disperse." 

So Chesterfield laughs at. — but, mille pardons, my lord, 
as a man of bon ton, never laughed — the ridiculous im- 
portance of blockheads, whose " significant shrugs and 
insignificant whispers are very entertaining to a by- 
stander." So in Thomson's Castle of Indolence, 

" The puzzling sons of party next appeared, 
In dark cabals and nightly juntos met ; 
And now they whispered close, now shrugging reared 
The important .shoulder ; then, as if to get 
New light, their twinkling eyes were inward set." 

The Doctor Packthread of transatlantic story is 
noted among his clerical brethren for his mastery of 



SIGNIFICANT SHRUGS AND SILEXCE. 59 

means whereby to serve his party and damage the 
opposing one; especially in spreading a convenient 
report, on necessary occasions, in any of those forms 
which do not assert, but which disseminate a slander 
quite as certainly as if they did; and thus he would 
whisper away a minister's orthodoxy by " innocent in- 
terrogations," or charitable hopes, or gentle sighs, or 
by " shakes of the head and liftings of the eyes at 
proper intervals in conversation, or lastly by silence 
when silence became the strongest as well as safest 
form of assertion." Against such sinister practice may 
Merlin's protest apply — 

'■ You breathe but accusation vast and vague, 
Spleen-born, I think, and proofless. If you know, 
Set up the charge you know, to stand or fall!" 

Or the lines in Lara about some who had seen they 
scarce knew what, but more than should have been: 

" All was not well, they deemed — but where the wrong? 
Some knew perchance — but 'twere a tale too long; 
And such besides were too discreetly wise 
To more than hint their knowledge in surmise; 
But if they would — they could.'' 

To the small wares and petty points of cunning enu- 
merated by Bacon, Whately is for adding what he calls 
''a very hackneyed trick, which is yet wonderfully suc- 
cessful," — the affecting a delicacy about mentioning 
particulars, and the hinting at what you "could" bring 
forward, only you do not wish to give offence. "We 
could give many cases to prove that such and such a 
medical system is all a delusion, and a piece of 
quackery; but we abstain, through tenderness for indi- 
viduals, from bringing names before the Public' 
Another cleri< yist remarks how easily an unfa- 

voural " may be got up in a rural district, by 

a man who combines caution with malignity: and all 



60 OBTRUSIVE RETICENCE. 

in such a way that you cannot lay hold of the wary 
malignant or maligner. Spoken to in praise of an 
acquaintance, for example, he will reply, in a hesitating 

way, " Yes, he's rather a nice fellow; but well, I don't 

want to say anything bad of any one/' In this way he 
avoids committing himself, but has managed to convey 
a worse impression than by any definite charge he could 
have made against the man. Justly deprecated as one 
of the most irritating things in the world, and capable 
of being made one of the most insulting, is that obtru- 
sive kind of reticence which parades itself, which makes 
mysteries and lets you see there are mysteries, which 
keeps silence and flaunts it in your face as an inten- 
tional silence, a silence as loud as words. If words are 
sharp arrows, this kind of dumbness — as exposed by an 
expositor of the art of reticence — is even sharper, and 
all the worse, because it puts it out of your power to 
complain ; for you cannot bring into court a list of looks 
and shrugs, or make it a grievance that a man held his 
tongue while you raved. " This is a common form of 
tormenting, however, with reticent people who have a 
moral twist;" and, it may be added, with malicious 
people who have a cautious turn. 

Mr. Disraeli lashes out against the high-bred folks 
who look affectedly confused when a scandalized name 
is mentioned, as if they could a tale unfold, if they were 
not convinced that the sense of propriety among all 
present is infinitely superior to their sense of curiosity. 
" Delicacy, my dear sir, delicacy!" says Mr. Dickens's 
man in blue, pulling up his neckerchief, and adjusting 
his coat cuffs, and nodding and frowning as if there 
were more behind, which he could say if he liked, but 
was bound in honour to suppress. The same author's 
Mrs. Nickleby is once at least presented to us in the 
act of nodding her head, and patting the back of her 



BROKEX HIXT, WHISPER, SHRUG, AXD SIGH. 61 

daughter's hand cautiously, and looking as if she could 
tell something vastly important if she chose, but had 
self-denial, thank her stars! and wouldn't do it. Owen 
Meredith's Wanderer professes to 

u know how tender friends of me 

Have talked with broken hint, and glance: 
The choicest flowers of calumny, 

That seem, like weeds, to spring from chance."' 

With which he associates that small, small, impercep- 
tible small talk, which cuts like powdered glass ground 
phana — "none can tell where lurks the power the 
poison has.'' With bitter expressiveness Byron asserted 
his large experience in the ways of malice — the highl- 
and byways, the plain broad road and the crooked 
paths and winding lanes of it, — 

" From the loud roar of foaming calumny 
To the small whisper of the as paltry few, 
And subtler venom of the reptile crew, 
The Janus-glance of whose significant eye, 
Learning to lie with silence, would seem true, 
And without utterance, save the shrug or sigh, 
A round to happy fools its speechless obloquy/' 



VII. 

SHOTTED OUT OF THE WORLD; OR, VALE- 
DICTORY MALEDICTION. 

VERBS xi. io. 

THE exultant shout of relief at a man's death might 
almost wake the dead man. It is hideous to think 
of a choral symphony of voices, jubilant at a dead march, 
making a triumphal march of their own of it, making 
the welkin ring with huzzas at death's last feat, and 
iming it to the echo. For those tumultuous paeans 
ful curse in their every note. They mean 
and they say what they mean. "When 



62 REJOICINGS AT A DEATH. 

the wicked perish, there is shouting." The bad man 
dead and gone is such a good riddance. The multitude 
account it, for themselves, not for him, such a happy 
release. 

The greatest of the greater prophets of the Old 
Testament indites the "triumphant insultation" of his 
country and his countrymen against the dead-and-gone 
king of Babylon, when that oppressor ceased, and the 
Lord broke the staff of the wicked and the sceptre of 
the rulers ; so that now the whole land was at rest, and 
quiet, and the voice of joyous singers alone disturbed 
that repose : yea, the fig-tree rejoiced against the dead 
king, and the cedars of Lebanon with them, saying, 
" Since thou art laid down, no feller is come up against 
us." 

When Alexander Jannseus, desirous of a reconcile- 
ment with his people, asked them what he should do 
to make them quite content, — " Die !" was the response. 
It was the only way. 

The death of Ethwald, in Joanna Baillie's tragedy, 
points the moral of the same bitter tale. Here are the 
closing lines of that drama, the purpose of which was to 
illustrate corrupt ambition as one of the passions most 
fatal when inordinately fostered and unscrupulously fol- 
lowed : 

" Through all the vexed land 

Let every heart bound at the joyful tidings ! 

Thus from his frowning height the tyrant falls 

Like a dark mountain, whose interior fires, 

Raging in ceaseless tumult, have devoured 

Its own foundations. Sunk in sudden ruin 

To the tremendous gulf, in the vast void 

No friendly rock rears its opposing head 

To stay the dreadful crash. . . . The joyful hinds 

Point to the traveller the hollow vale 

Where once it stood." 

Memorable in the prison experiences of Herod 



TIBERIUS; HEROD A GRIP PA; MAXIM IX. 63 

Agrippa was the arrival of news that the tyrant ot 
Capreae was dead : immediately on the death of Tibe- 
rius, Marsyas, Agrippa's faithful bond-slave, hastened 
to his master's dungeon, and communicated the joyful 
intelligence, saying in the Hebrew language, " The lion 
is dead." The centurion on guard heard the rejoicing, 
inquired as to the cause, ordered the royal prisoner's 
chains to be struck off, and invited him to supper. But 
more mem arable was the exultation, widely felt and 
cruelly expressed, at Agrippa's own death — that loath- 
some death, so strange in its surroundings, of which 
a tale is told in the Acts of the Apostles. The inhabit- 
ants of ; and Ca^sarea, as we learn from J< 
phus, and particularly Herod's own soldiers, indulged 
in the most brutal rejoicings at his death — heaping his 
memory with reproaches, and submitting the statues of 
his young daughter to every sort of indignity and sym- 
bolical outrage. So with Sejanus and the mob of Rome 
— a mob greatly given to such explosions of hate, as in 
the case of Pompey's father, whose body they tore from 
the bier, at his funeral, and dragged it through the 

of the city. In his account of the death of the 
r Maximin, Gibbon It is easier t<> con- 

ceive than to describe the universal joy of the Roman 

m the fall of the tyrant." Characteristic is the 

same historian's remark in reference to the death of 

Julian, and the effect of it upon Jovian : "The esteem 

an enemy is most sincerely expressed by his fears ; 

ree of fear may be accurately measured by 

the joy with which he celebrates his deliverance." Wit- 

j the transports of Pope Innocent IV. at the death 

Emperor Frederick, whereat his Holiness 

bin ng of triumph, addressed to all the 

and all the nobles of the realm (the greater 

number of whom, houe. D m Milman says, 



64 REJOICINGS AT A DEATH. 

to have been insensible of the blessing) : " Let the hea- 
vens rejoice, and let the earth be glad," at this great 
deliverance. In the previous century, while there was 
the profoundest sorrow in Germany at the loss of that 
Emperor Henry whose wisdom and valour were com- 
pared with Solomon and David, yet, considering that 
" the annals of tyranny contain nothing more revolt- 
ing than his cruelties to his Italian subjects," no wonder 
that at his death the cry of rejoicing broke forth from 
Calabria to Lombardy. 

The death of the young French king, Francis II., 
husband of Mary Stuart, when announced in Scotland, 
occasioned " extraordinary exultation " on the part of 
the "ministers," who not only accounted it a great 
deliverance for them and for their country, but also a 
special judgment inflicted upon an infidel and stubborn 
prince. Ten years later, on the other hand, the news 
of the Regent Murray's assassination produced in France 
a paroxysm of joy, and was followed by active prepara- 
tions to improve the event, in a highly practical way. 
Next year the hurried trial, condemnation, and death 
by hanging of the primate Hamilton, caused jubilant 
rejoicings among the Reformed party, lay and clerical ; 
and this distich was affixed to the gallows on which he 
suffered : 

" Cresce din felix arbor, semperque vireto 
Frondibus, qui nobis talia poma feras." 

When the " Huguenot Pope," Sixtus V., died, in 
1590, the removal of one who had so little favoured 
the League, and who swayed so perceptibly, as one 
historian expresses it, in the direction of the hated 
Bearnese, was hailed as a matter of great rejoicing by 
the Spanish party in Rome, who bestowed as much 
ignominy upon his memory as if he had been a heretic ; 
while in Paris his decease was celebrated with bonfires 






POST-MORTEM INSUL TA TIONS. 6; 

and other marks of popular hilarity. The death of 
Richelieu is said to have been felt by France like the 
relief from a nightmare : from the king to the lowest 
rhymester of the rudlcs, all joined in the burden of the 
couplets which proclaimed it — " II est parti, il a plie 
bagage, Ce cardinal !" Xot the partridges, moor-fowl, 
and hares apostrophized by Burns, by way of congratu- 
lation on the decease of such a crack shot as Tarn 
Samson, could have exulted more effusively in their 
proclaimed deliverance : 

'• Rejoice, ye birring paitricks a'; 
Ye cootie moorcocks, crously craw ; 
Ye maukins, cock your fud fu' braw, 

YVithouten dread ; 
Your mortal fae is now awa' — 

Tarn Samson's dead!'' 

The Grand Monarque himself, when he died, — when it 
3 positively known that the old king had ceased to 
breathe, why, the people are said to have gone half mad 
with j<>y. Voltaire was a curious observer of the gain- 
's erected along the St.-Denis Road on the day of 
the funeral, and in them he saw le peuple hire de vin 
etdejoie tic ia mart de Louis XIV. At the news of the 
lent death of the Czar Paul I., the whole city of 
rsburg — army, nobles, and populace — rejoiced 
with one consent. Such were the transports of the 
Turks in Constantinople when the head of All Pacha 
brought thither, and exposed at the gate of the 
• in a silver dish, that one would have supposed, 
the historian, the whole mass of the Sultan's ene- 
n destroyed by a single blow. 
r the battle of Ligny, a rumour spread that 
HIu' vieux diablc, as Napoleon commonly called 

him, wa fell-nigh the old marshal was; and 

made the most of it in cheering the 

v 



66 l LE DIABLE EST MORTP 

hopes of his soldiers in the struggle that followed at 
Waterloo : to be able to assure them that the vieux 
diable was veritably mort was worth more than a squad- 
ron to the French side. So his Imperial Majesty seems 
to have gone about asserting the fact of that mortality, 
as persistently as Denis, the swearing trooper, in Mr. 
Reade's historical fiction, kept to that perennial phrase, 
Le diable est mort, — all in the style of Owen Meredith's 
stanzas of News, beginning, " News, news, news, my 
gossiping friends ! I have wonderful news to tell 
. . . The Devil is dead," etc. There never yet was 
a time that had not its proclaimers and sometimes its 
believers in news too good to be true. 

One of the most effective proofs suggested by Dr. 
Moore of the hatefulness of his " hero," Zeluco, is the 
fact that while that detested master languished between 
life and death, the mind of the patient himself was 
hardly more cruelly agitated between fear and hope 
than that of every slave, male and female, that belonged 
to him. So that when he was pronounced out of dan- 
ger, the news produced a shock like that of electricity 
over his whole family and household. " A number of 
slaves who happened to be at work in the garden under 
the window of Zeluco's bedchamber, burst into a loud 
and uncontrollable howl of sorrow when his recovery 
was first announced to them." In an after chapter his 
physician mildly counsels a change of conduct towards 
his slaves ; " for certainly that man is in a most miser- 
able as well as dangerous situation, who lives among 
those who rejoice in his sickness, howl with despair at 
his recovery, and whose only hope of tranquillity lies 
in their own death or his." But Dr. Moore's hero was 
not given to ask any such advice, or take it. 

There is hardly on record a more emphatic illustra- 






RAPTURES AT ROBESPIERRE'S DEATH. 67 

tion of our subject than is afforded in history by the 
death of Robespierre. Ecstatic were the jubilations of 
men, women, and children, when that event became 
known for certain. In one of Landor's least-known 
Imaginary Conversations, a description occurs of a tra- 
veller's approach to Montreuil at the period in question, 
and seeing the ruined monastery near the town-gate 
covered with garlands, and the people in holiday attire. 
His c image stops, and he asks, "What festival is this 
to-d The answer is from fifty voices, " The mon- 

ster is dead \ n Alison writes of the scene in the streets 
of Paris, while Robespierre was being taken to the scaf- 
fold, " The joy was universal ; it almost approached to 
delirium." One woman, breaking from the crowd, ad- 
the doomed dictator, " Murderer of all my kin- 
dred ! your agony fills me with joy." Present physical 
agony the wretched man was suffering, from that broken 
jaw, the bandage of which covered all his face but the 
forehead and one eve. The decree of the Convention, 
which declared him beyond the pale of the law, had 
been welcomed at daybreak by ten thousand prisoners 
who were thereby relieved from the prospect of instant 
death. Ail through France, " the passengers leapt from 
the public conveyances, embraced the bystanders, ex- 
clai:. e, mes amis, Robespierre is no more ; 

the tiger is dead ! ' Two hundred thousand captives 
in the \: throughout the country were freed from 

* Josephine- Beaubarnais was one of these; and in her Memoirs 
she has left a graphic record of her mean-, of Learning tlie great 
dehv She and Mad. une d'Aiguillon were Leaning against 

of their prison window, when they saw a poor woman of 
their acquaintance making a number . which were quite 

unint it t'ir-,L The sign-maker kept holding up her -own 

{robe) ; and Jo seeing that she had some object in \ 

calk.. She then 

lifted up a stone and put it in her Lap, repeating the action until 



68 RAPTURES AT ROBESPIERRE'S DEATH. 

the terror of death ; three hundred thousand trembling 
fugitives issued from their retreats, and embraced each 
other with frantic joy on the public roads." The epi- 
taph designed for his tomb is significant : " Passant ! 
ne pleure point son sort ; Car s'il vivait, tu serais mort." 
Wordsworth, in his autobiographic poem, has this epi- 
sode in the book devoted to his residence in France, — 
a parallel passage, in fact, to that already cited from 
Walter Savage Landor : 

" Not far from that still ruin all the plain 
Lay spotted with a variegated crowd. 
Of vehicles and travellers. . . . I paused, 
Longing for skill to paint a scene so bright 
And cheerful ; but the foremost of the band 
As he approached, no salutation given 
In the familiar language of the day, 
Cried, • Robespierre is dead!' — nor was a doubt, 
After strict question, left within my mind, 
That he and his supporters all were fallen. 

Great was my transport, deep my gratitude 
To everlasting Justice, by this fiat 
Made manifest. ' Come now, ye golden times,' 
Said I, forth-pouring on those open sands 
A hymn of triumph." 

Josephine called out, " Pierre?" and a joyous affirmative was the 
reply. Then, joining the pierre to her robe, the woman eagerly 
imitated the motion of the guillotine, dancing about the while with 
an abandon of furious delight. " This singular pantomime awakened 
in our minds a vague hope that possibly Robespierre might be no 
more. 

" At this moment, when we were vacillating between hope and 
fear, we heard a great noise in the corridor, and the terrible voice 
of our gaoler, who said to his dog, giving him a kick at the same 
time, ' Get along, you cursed Robespierre!' That coarse phrase 
at once taught us that we had nothing to fear, and that France was 
saved." — Mem. de Josephine, i., 253. 



VIII. 

SECRETS BLABBED AND SECRETS KEPT 
Proverbs xi. 13. 

THE Book of Proverbs stigmatizes again and again 
the incontinent babblers that cannot keep a secret. 
"A tale-bearer revealeth secrets; but he that is of a 
faithful spirit concealcth the matter." The difference is 
a sharply drawn one, the distinction a distinctly defined 
one, between fidelity and unfaithfulness, between the 
treacherous and the loyal. " The words of a tale- 
bearer are as wounds, and they go down into the inner- 
parts of the belly," — piercing even, to apply New 
Testament diction, to the dividing asunder of soul and 
spirit, and of the joints and marrow. Therefore, " dis- 
cover not a secret to another." "Where no wood is, 
there the fire goeth out; so, where there is no tale- 
;-, the strife ceaseth." The Son of Sirach counsels 
1 rehearse not unto another that which has been 
confided to ourselves: "Whether it be friend or foe, talk 
of other men's lives; and if thou canst without 
offence, reveal them not. ... If thou hast heard a 
Word, let it (lie with thee; and be bold, it will not burst 
thee." And last, not least, on the list of things of 
which we should be ashamed, he places the " iterating 
and speaking again that which thou hast heard; and re- 
vealing of secrets." 

Horace's Arcanique Fides prodiga, pellucidior vitro % is 
a very unfaithful sort of Faith, a transparent infidel to 
Fidelity. Est et fideli Uita silentio Merces, he says, in 
anoth with an emphatic veto {vetabo) on associa- 

tion with the blabber of sacred 'Mure is a 

Danish proverb, quoted in the Archbishop of Dublin's 



70 'LIKE PENCE IN CHILDREN'S POCKETS 

book, which warns us well against relying too much on 
other men's silence, since there is no rarer gift than the 
capacity of keeping a secret: "Tell nothing to thy 
friend which thy enemy may not know." The Psalmist 
can scarcely give greater force to his picture of men 
far gone in wickedness and the practice of it, than by 
saying that they keep it secret, every man in the deep 
of his heart. Woman's weakness is intimated in the 
warning of the prophet Micah — but not until he has 
also cautioned against trusting in a friend of the other 
sex: " Keep the door of thy mouth from her that lieth 
in thy bosom ;" referring, be it remembered, to a time 
when a man's foes should be they of his own house. 
Portia, that woman well-reputed, Cato's daughter, plead- 
ing to be made sharer in her husband's secrets, appeals 
to the self-inflicted wound she can bear with patience; 
can bear that, " and not my husband's secrets ?" " Tell 
me your counsels, I will not disclose them; I have made 
strong proof of my constancy," in that ugly gash afore- 
said; and the appeal makes Brutus promise that her 
bosom shall be sharer in all the secrets of his heart. 
But she finds a strain upon her when she comes to know 
all, and sighs forth in soliloquy, — 

" O constancy, be strong upon my side ! 
Set a huge mountain 'twixt my heart and tongue ! 
I have a man's mind, but a woman's might. 
How hard it is for women to keep counsel ! " 

Harry Percy's wife is less successful in her appeal to be 
taken entirely into Hotspur's confidence : " Constant 
you are," he agrees, " but yet a woman; and for 
secrecy, — 

" No lady closer ; for I well believe, 
Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know; 
And so far will I trust thee, gentle Kate ! 

Lady Percy. How! so far? 

Hotspur. Not an inch farther." 






SECRETS LIE IX FEMALE BOSOMS: 71 

Un secret, says a saucy French writer, tourmente 
unefemme quune colique; et commc il est trls-agrcable de 
raconter, die ri est pas longtemps malade. Schleiermacher, 
on the other hand, deemed it sheer foil)' to say that 
women cannot be depended upon for silence. " I shall 
trust implicitly in yours," he told his Jette; " and I feel 
convinced that no fear would wring a secret from you 
that I had confided to you." It is not fear that is to be 
1. however, in the common run of cases. The ex- 
pert adviser in Crabbe's Maid's Story winds up her 
counsels to her "dear Martha " with the monition, — 

'■ And one tiling more — to free yourself from foes, 
r a secret to your friend disclose; 
Secrets with girls, like loaded guns with boys, - 
Are never valued till they make a noise ; 
To show how trusted, they their power display ; 
To show how worthy, they the trust betray : 
Like pence in children's pockets secrets lie 
In female bosoms — they must burn or fly." 

iol knows a secret, he tells it because he is a fool; 
if a knave knows one, he tells it wherever it is .his in- 
to tell it. But women and young men — according 
to Lord Chesterfield's maxim — are very apt to tell what 
secrets they know, from the vanity of having been trusted. 
"Trust none of these, wherever you can help it." La 
ntaine is impartial between the sexes: — 

" Ricn nc pesc tant qu'un secret: 

vrter loin est difficile aux dames ; 
Et je sais meme sur ce fait 

. oombre d'hommes qui sont femm 

Bruyere holds a man to be more faithful to the 
secret of another than to his own; but a woman to 
her own secret much better than any one's else. 
[Pontine reproaches Kudoxe, 

" V 'lie, Eudoxe, et voua a\ <•/ pai I 

savoir cettc gran de nouveUe 



ABLE TO KEEP A SECRET: 



Sans la dire a. l'oreille a quelque ame infidele, 
A qui grand secret a pese comme a. vous." 

Miss Richland complains of Olivia, in Goldsmith's 
Good-natured Man, " Would you believe it, Garnet, I told 
her all my secrets, and yet the sly cheat concealed all 
this from me?"" "And upon my word, madam," replies 
Garnet, " I don't much blame her; she was very loth to 
trust one with her secrets, that was so very bad at keep- 
ing her own." Mr. Creevy was one day told in strictest 
confidence by Sheridan, after dinner, when the ladies 
had left the room, of a fortune having just been left him. 
" Mrs. Sheridan and I," said he, " have made a solemn 
vow to each other to mention it to no one ; and nothing 
induces me now to confide it to you, but the absolute 
conviction that Mrs. Sheridan is at this moment confiding 
it to Mrs. Creevy upstairs." Perhaps Richard Brinsley 
would have accepted as applicable to any woman the epi- 
gram which Coleridge penned against a particular one: — 

" ' She's secret as the grave, allow.' 
' I do : I cannot doubt it. 
But 'tis a grave with tombstone on, 
That tells you all about it.' " 

When Don Abbondio, in Manzoni's Promessi Sftosi, 
entreated Perpetua to be silent on a certain subject, she 
replied that there was no necessity for enjoining a thing 
so obvious and proper; but certain it is that the secret 
remained in the heart of the poor woman as new wine in 
an old cask, which ferments and bubbles, and if it does not 
send the bung into the air, works out in foam between 
the staves, and drops here and there, so that one can 
drink it, and tell what sort of wine it is. Cethegus, in 
Jonson's Catiline, protests that he'd be torn in pieces, 
with wild Hippolytus, nay prove the death every limb 
over, ere he'd trust a woman with wind, could he retain. 
Sempronia retorts, — 



A VEXED QUESTION OF SEX. 73 



" Sir, they'll be trusted 

With as good secrets yet as you have any ; 
And carry them too as close and as concealed 
As you shall for your heart." 

Maitland could assure Cecil, in sad earnest, that the 
Queen of Scots could "well enough keep her own 
counsel when she had no will that an)' man should be 
privy of her doings." Quite a mistaken idea, Theodore 
Hook deems it. that a woman cannot keep a secret — 
44 nobody so well." Trust her but with half, or try to 
keep it from her altogether, and then, he admits, she is 
sure to beat you, because her pride prompts her to find 
out what is purposely concealed, and her vanity induces 
her to tell what she has found out; and this in order to 
>w her power of discovery. " Trust all to her, and 

will never betray you; but half a confidence is not 
worth having." A Quarterly Reviewer speaks of it 
having for centuries suited us to circulate a well-turned 

>f fallacies respecting woman's incapacity for keeping 

cret — the motive being merely thereby to secure an 
incessant scapegoat, on whom to lay the shame of our 
own indiscretions. " Now we are too happy when one of 
the sex will condescend to become the confidante of 
any secrets we may possess, and feel them honoured by 
her acceptance, whether she keeps them or no." The 

3 of Mrs. Centlivre's comedy of The Wonder, is "A 

Woman keep.-, a Secret," — and Yiolante is herself the 

;der. Pallid Phcebe Maries, the handmaiden of 

Lady Audley, and mistress of Lady Audley's secret, 

'!'• who, -ilent and self-contained, seems to hold her- 
self within herself, and take no colour from the outer 

' 1. Robert Audley, tin: observant barrister, scru- 

ly, as she mow- about the room. And, 

"That," he thought, "is a woman who could keep a 

Mi-. Tennyson's "rosy blonde," Melissa, has 



74 ABLE TO KEEP A SECRET. 

no such aspect, but, despite her complexion, and with 
her lips apart, and all her thoughts as fair within her 
eyes * as bottom agates seen to wave and float in crystal 
currents of clear morning "seas, she can be trusted to 
prove no "Danai'd of a leaky vase," and to Lady 
Psyche's appeal, 

" ' Ah, fear me not,' 

Replied Melissa, ' no — I would not tell, 

No, not for all Aspasia's cleverness, 

No, not to answer, Madam, all those hard things 

That Sheba came to ask of Solomon/" 

Crabbe's poor Dolly Murrey, of the Borough almshouses, 
had won, in her day, and kept a reputation as 

" Mistress of secrets : both the young and old 
In her confided — not a tale she told. ;; 

Betty, in the Clandestine Marriage, urges Miss Fanny to 
tell her all, for there's " not a more trustier creature on 
the face of the earth, than I am. Though I say it, I am 
as secret as the grave; and if it is never told till I tell 
it, it may remain untold till doomsday for Betty. 
. . . . And yet I vow and purtest there's more 
plague than pleasure with a secret; especially if a body 
mayn't mention it to four or five of one's particular 
acquaintance." For a moment George Geith is tempted 
to tell Lady Geith his whole story; but he puts the 
temptation aside, remembering that confidence, even to 
the nearest and dearest, usually proves an expensive 
luxury ; and thinking of the old saw, that three people 
can keep a secret if two are away. The Duchess of 
Malfi is less wary in Cariola's instance, to whose "known 
secrecy " she confides more than her life — her fame; and 
is promised both shall be safe; "for I'll conceal this 
secret from the world as warily as those that trade in 
poison keep poison from their children." But one should 
be careful not to entrust another unnecessarily with a 



CRITICAL COXFIDEXCES. 

secret which it may be a hard matter to keep; nor 
should one's desire for aid or sympathy be indulged by 
dragging other people into one's misfortunes. " There 
is as much responsibility in imparting your own secrets, 
as in keeping those of your neighbour/' says the author 
of Friends in Council. Unenviable in the extreme is the 
position of the page to whom Don Carlos says, in Schiller, 

'ireful secret hast thou in thy keeping, 
Which, like a poison of terrific power, 

vers the cup that holds it into atoms. 
Guard even,- look of thine, nor let thy head 
5S at thy bosom's secret. Be thou like 
The senseless speaking-trumpet, that receh 
id echoes back the voice, but hears it not.'' 

Assertions of entire competency to carry any amount 
of secrets, however weighty, and to keep them any 
length of time, against all comers, are cheap and com- 
mon enough. Shakspcare's yEneas assures Troilus that 
" the secrets of nature have not more gift in taciturnity" 
than he. One of his French lords in All's Well that 
promises another who enjoins absolute ob- 
ince of a critical secret, " When you have spoken it, 
I, and I am the grave of it." Lpvel assures John 
'dvil, in Lamb's tragedy, " I am no babbler, sir, you 
1 not fear me," — and " How strange this passionate 
behaviour shows in you! sure you think me some weak 
adds, when his too confiding friend hints at a 
possible Delilah to "kiss out secrets" from him. One 
tor tells another, in Ethwald, a secret he has been 
stringently cautioned by the original teller to tell to 
that Kthwald may not hear it: — 

" is/. . A id thou in sooth '.ion well. 

v hear thou this from me; thou art a lout; 
And over and besides a babbling fool; 

. and moreover all, I'll break thy head 
If tl tell again, in any wise, 

tittle of it. 



76 SECRETS BLABBED 

ind serv. Marry, I can be as secret as thyself! 
I tell not those who blab. 

\st serv. Yes, yes, thy caution is most scrupulous ; 
Thou 'It whisper it in Ethwald's hither ear, 
And bid the further not to know of it." 

Je suis muet, professes or promises the Abbe when 
Scribe's Michonnet touches on a secret, and off at that 
tangent ; but the old man distrusts the promise or pro- 
fession: " C'est ce que chacun dit toujours dans le 
comite, et cependant tout finit par se savoir." Within 
the barbican of Spenser's House of Temperance a porter 

sat, and 

" Utterers of secrets he from thence debar'd." 

John Locke was an exceptional man morally as well as 
intellectually, and not the least so in this particular, that 
he not only, says Le Clerc, kept strictly a secret which 
had been confided to him, but he never mentioned any- 
thing which could prove injurious, although he had not 
been enjoined secrecy. And indeed, as Sir A. Helps has 
remarked, for once that secrecy is formally imposed upon 
you, it is implied a hundred times by the concurrent 
circumstances : all that your friend says to you as your 
friend, is entrusted to you only; and in fact there are 
few conversations which do not imply some degree of 
mutual confidence, however slight. 

Pulteney (Lord Bath) was not altogether singular in 
attempting to prove that he could keep new secrets by 
revealing old ones, that is, by boasting of the instances 
in which he had been already trusted. 

La Bruyere's list of violators of confidence includes 
those — hardly perhaps to be placed on the list — who 
are contemptuous of your secret, whatever its import- 
ance, — " qui meprisent votre secret, de quelque conse- 
quence qu'il puisse etre: 'C'est un mystere? un tel m'en 
a fait part, et m'a defendu de le dire;' et ils le disent." 
Horace Walpole prays Lady Ossory to be restored to 



AXD SECRETS KEPT. 77 

his character of indiscreet in her good opinion, " or my 
neighbour Mr. Ellis will come and trust me with some 
secret out of the Utrecht Gazette. I have escaped 
many such sage friends by not reverencing mystery, to 
the prejudice of my preferment, no doubt; but I do not 
regret my misfortune, though my error is evident." 
Berthier is believed to have secured preferment with 
oleon by his "perfect silence'' in matters of privy 
trust; for a secret divulged to Berthier was as safe as 
if its possessor were in his grave. " Can you keep a 
secret 3 " the dying man in Mr. Reade's Sheffield story 
asks of the inquisitor that is urging him to make a 
clean breast of it: "Yes!" exclaims the other, eagerly. 
" Then so can I," are the next, and the last, words of the 
resolute spirit overtaken by death. 

Cowper tells Unwin he need never fear the communi- 
cation of what he entrusts to him in confidence. u I 
once wrote a Connoisseur upon the subject of secret-keep- 
ing, and from that day to this I believe I have never 
divulged one/' And again, three months later, " I am 
glad of your confidence, and have reason to hope I shall 
never abuse it. If you trust me with a secret, I am 
hermetically sealed." Or, as the porter in the Arabian 
res the ladies, " A secret with me is as sure 
as if it were in a closet whose key was lost, and the door 
sealed up." Mr. Sarcastic lost the acquaintance of Mrs. 
Cullender, by saying to her, when she had told him a 
piece of gossip as a very particular secret, that there 

IS nothing SO agreeable to him as to be in possession 
:ret, for he made a point of telling it to all his 
acquaintance. 

-trusted under solemn vows 
Mum and Silence and the Rose, 
•_• retailed again in wbis] 
For the easy credulous to dispel 9 . 



78 BLABBERS OF EITHER SEX. 

as Hudibras has it. Mrs. Cullender left her ingenuous 
confidant in great wrath, protesting that she would 
never again throw away her confidence on so leaky 
a vessel. The Dalilah of the Agonistes excuses her 
weakness as one incident to all her sex — the double 
weakness of curiosity, inquisitive, importunate of secrets, 
" then, with like infirmity, to publish them, both common 
female faults." Did not she of Timna first betray 
Samson, and reveal the secret she wrested from him, 
carrying it straight to those who had corrupted her, his 
spies and rivals? The strong man thus rates the dis- 
grace of blabbing when it is not woman that blabs: 

" To have revealed 



Secrets of men, the secrets of a friend, 
How heinous had the fact been, how deserving 
Contempt, and scorn of all, to be excluded 
All friendship, and avoided as a blab, 
The mark of fool set on his front \" 

Portia extracted his secret from Brutus by the signal 
and sanguinary proof she could offer him of self-control. 
And with Portia, says Dean Merivale, the secret of the 
tyrannicides was secure; but not so with many of the 
wild unprincipled men to whom it had been confided. 

In his history of the revolt of Sicily in A.D. 1280, 
Gibbon remarks that the secret, so widely diffused and 
so freely circulated, was preserved above two years with 
impenetrable discretion ; each of the conspirators de- 
claring that he would cut off his left hand if it were 
conscious of the intentions of his right. Cardinal de 
Retz used to say that a secret is more easily kept by 
a good many people than one commonly imagines — a 
secret of importance he meant, among people interested 
in the keeping of it. And Chesterfield is of the same 
mind, where he holds that a secret properly communi- 
cated, only to those who are to be concerned in the 



TRUSTY KEEPERS OF SECRETS. 

thing in question, will probably be kept by them, many 
though they be. " Little secrets are commonly told 
again, but great ones generally kept." Hundreds of 
persons, the very poorest included, were in the secret of 
Prince Charles Edward's fugitive movements in the 
Highlands ; but, with one or two dubious exceptions, 
not one was found to whisper the secret, not one at- 
tempted to give him up to his enemies, the offered 
reward of thirty thousand pounds notwithstanding. So 
too in the Vendean campaign of 1S32 the Duchess of 
Berri changed her abode not less (according to M. 
.yen than three or four times a week, and every 
change was known to eight or ten persons at least, yet, 
in the course of six months, not a single person betrayed 
the honourable confidence reposed in him. Not Port- 
land himself, whom, by Macaulay's account, nature and 
habit co-operating had made the best keeper of secrets 
in Europe, could have better sustained that character. 

Candid natures count it hard lines when they are 
forced to be reticent, in their own despite. But they 
make capital keepers of secrets nevertheless. Like the 
simple-minded Cornishman in story, Francis Tredethlyn, 
onfiding candour had been wont to reveal his 
ling, and every shade of feeling, to his trusted 
if not trusty friend ; but who, when once he had his 
ret to keep, kept it, all against the grain of his dis- 
1, so well. " I never had but one secret to keep," 
quoth Parson Dale, " and I hope I shall never have 
another. A secret is very like a lie." "You had a 
secret tl. Kclaims Richard Avenel, who had learnt, 

in America, to be a very inquisitive man ; and 
he adds point-blank, "Pray, what was it?" "Why, 
what it would not be if I told you," rejoined the Parson, 
— "a secret" Old Mr. Trivett, in another fiction, is dis- 
ci by hi ted friend- as the "deadest hand at 



8o ABLE TO KEEP A SECRET. 

a secret in the world. He never lets out anything. If 
you ask him what it is o'clock, you have to dig the 
information out of him with a ripping-chisel. Oh no ; 
it's not the smallest use trying to learn anything from 
Mr. Trivett." Mr. Tulkinghorne, the family solicitor in 
Bleak House, wears an expressionless mask, and carries 
family secrets in every limb of his body and every 
crease of his dress. Whether he yields his clients any- 
thing beyond the services he sells, is his personal secret ; 
and that he keeps, as he keeps the secrets of his clients : 
" He is his own client in that matter, and will never 
betray himself." His reticence is the admiration of the 
gushing, antiquated Volumnia Dedlock — for he is so 
original, such a stolid creature, she declares, such an 
immense being for knowing all sorts of things and 
never telling them. She is persuaded that he must 
be a Freemason, and the head of a lodge. The Abbe 
d'Olivet gives this character of Conrart the academician, 
// gardait inviolablement le secret des autres et le sien. 
St. Simon affirms of Lewis the Fourteenth that he kept 
the secrets of others as religiously as his own, and that 
there was no mistress, minister, or favourite who could 
worm them out, even though themselves concerned in 
the matter. Now the French have, or had, no character 
for reticence, if we may trust so authoritative an old 
writer as Howell, who, midway in the seventeenth cen- 
tury, contrasting the Mounseer with the Don, affirmed 
it to be " a kind of sicknesse for a Frenchman to keep a 
secret long," whereas " all the drugs of Egypt cannot 
get it out of a Spaniard." Sir Arthur Helps somewhere 
speaks of " grave proud men " as very safe confidants ; 
and he moots the question whether a secret will escape 
sooner by means of a vain man or a simpleton. Some 
people play with a secret, until at last it is suggested 
by their manner to some shrewd person who knows a 



THE ART OF RETICEXCE. Si 

little of the circumstances connected with it ; others are 
treacherous, and sell it for their advantage ; others, out 
of conceit, wear it as an ornament ; others are indis- 
creet, and so let it drop by accident. Relating a case 
of this last kind, Mr. de Quincey enforces the doctrine 
that honour and fidelity do not form sufficient guaran- 
tees for the custody of secrets : presence of mind so as 
to revive one's obligations in time, tenacity of recollec- 
tion, and vigilance over one's own momentary slips of 
tongue, so as to keep watch over indirect disclosures, 
are also requisite. Indeed he refuses to believe that, 
>s where the secret is of a nature to affect some 
person's life, most people would remember beyond a 
period of two years the most solemn obligations to 
secrecy. After a lapse of time, varying of course with 
the person, the substance of the secret will remain upon 
the mind ; but how he came by the secret, or under 
what circumstances, he will very probably have forgot- 
ten. u It is unsafe to rely upon the most religious or 
sacramental obligation to secrecy, unless, together with 
the secret, you could transfer also a magic ring that 
should, by a growing pressure or puncture, sting a man 
timely alarm and warning." Of all personal quali- 
the art of reticence is justly said to be the most 
important and valuable for a professional man to pos- 
•r physician, he must be able to hold all 
and hear all without betraying by word or look, by inju- 
fence any more than by overt treachery, by 
• it a malicious accusation any more than by a 
smile at an egregious mistake : his business is to be 
reticent, not exculpatory, to maintain silence, not set up 
nee n<»r yet proclaim the truth. Lad)' physicians 
we already have, and esteemed one-, ; and lady lav 
estimable <»r not, may follow ; but whether these prac- 
• ill come up to the mark, as regards the re- 



82 BELOW-STAIRS BLABBING. 

quirements of. professional secrecy, time must show. 
Their capacity for it will be denied by male censors of 
the Baretti type, — for Baretti it was who, when London 
society was vexing the question of the authorship of 
Miss Burney's Evelina, laid a wager it was written by a 
man ; for no woman, he said, could have kept her own 
counsel. When Fanny told this to King George, his 
majesty was " diverted " exceedingly ; still more when 
she owned to her suspicion, with respect to the final dis- 
covery, that one of her sisters had betrayed her. " Oh ! 
your sister ? " exclaimed the king : " what, not your 
brother ? . . . Vastly well ! I see you are of Mr. 
Baretti's mind, and think your brother could keep your 
secret, and not your sister.-" A female servant would 
by some be fixed on as the likeliest of all blabs; for 
servants in general have the reputation of being the 
most determined tellers of secrets, and female servants 
in particular. 

Madame de Maintenon used to lecture her young 
ladies at St. Cyr on the liability of the upper classes to 
be discussed at all points, and in all shades of character, 
by their servants ; for these "when they are alone, talk 
of nothing but their masters and mistresses ; and if there 
is ever so little evil -to tell, they are sure to divulge it. 
Reputation often depends more upon these people than 
their betters, who do not see us so near." Mr. Weller 
sees his way clear to a full knowledge of Mr. Charles 
Fitz-Marshall by means of pumping that gentleman's 
valet : "If I can get a talk with this here servant in 
the morning he'll tell me all his master's concerns." 
" How do you know that ? " interposed Mr. Pickwick. 
fi Bless your heart, sir, servants always do," replied Mr. 
Weller ; whose master assents with an acquiescent " Oh, 
ah, I forgot that." A scarcely less popular writer ex- 



I 



OUR SERVANTS MASTERS OF OUR SECRETS. S3 

patiates on the dreary theme of servants " enjoying the 
fun " of upstairs trouble : they listen, we are fairly 
warned, at our doors, and repeat our spiteful speeches 
in the kitchen, and watch us while they wait at table, 
and understand even- sarcasm, every innuendo, every 
look. " The most polished form your hate and anger 
can take is transparent to those household spies. . . . 
Nothing is lost upon those quiet, well-behaved watchers." 
Joseph Haydn tells Consuelo, who has seen the secrets 
of courts, that he, as lackeys are accustomed to read 
their 1 letters, has learnt in the ante-chamber the 

hidden life of the great. " Oh, if great people only knew 
how the:: -peak of them ! " 

Does poor silly Corydon, in Juvenal, really hold that 
great men's secrets ever lie untold ? that sen-ants keep 
them : turn divitis id I urn esse pittas f Send ut 

Secrets often indeed of the servants' own 
concocting, — for stewards, cooks, and butlers are apt to 
spread the mere malicious fictions of their head. If 
however there be upstairs secrets, trust the sen-ants' hall 
for being "up to" them, not to keeping them. Tristram 
Shandy takes pains to show how the kitchen keep- 
■.rant in regard of all that is of private inten 
moment to master and mi 1 exceptional 

establishment was Cato the Censor could 

11 what master was about, or so much 
own that they knew. Miror magis % becaus 
Sha'. i-captain has it, 

" You know what great ones do, 

The less will prattle of," 

and the least, perhaps, most of all. Swift's Directions to 

mts bid the footman, in order to learn the secrets 

ther families, tell those of his ma •thus will 

a favuurite both at home and abroad, and be 

regarded as a person of importance." Juvenal describes 



84 SERVANTS' MASTERY OF 

a set of adventurers at Rome who got introduced into 
families as slaves, and having mastered the master's 
secrets, levied hush-money on the strength of it : Scire 
volunt secreta domih, atque inde timeri. Well might the 
great satirist warn masters to live decent lives, if only to 
defy the tongues of their domestics — for, of a bad ser- 
vant, the worst part is the tongue: nam lingua mali pars 
-bessima servi. Even in a good servant, as servants go, 
it is bad enough. Aurora Leigh complains that being 
observed, when observation is not sympathy, is just 
being tortured ; and wonderful are servants' powers of 
observation, exercised as preliminaries to their powers 
of tongue : 

" Susannah could not stand and twist my hair, 
Without such glancing at the looking-glass 
To see my face there, that she missed the plait : 
And John, — I never sent my plate for soup, 
Or did not send it, but the foolish John 
Resolved the problem 'twixt his napkin'd hands, 
Of what was signified by taking soup 
Or choosing mackerel." 

But sometimes equally remarkable is waiting-man's or 
waiting-woman's skill in assuming an air of unconscious- 
ness. " Servants are wonderful actors," says Mr. Trol- 
lope, " looking often as though they knew nothing when 
they know everything, — as though they understood no- 
thing, when they understand all." Mr. Charles Reade, 
in the opening chapter of one of his novels, describes a 
father and son at dinner, subject to the presence and 
pressure of " three live suppressors of confidential inter- 
course," two gorgeous footmen, and a " sombre, sublime, 
and in one word, episcopal" butler, who all three seemed 
models of grave discretion, but were known to be all 
ears, and bound by a secret oath to carry down each 
crumb of dialogue to the servants' hall, for curious dis- 
section, and boisterous ridicule. One of Lord Lytton's 



THEIR MASTERS' SECRETS. 85 



people opines that servants have the longest pair of ears 
of any created beings, jackasses not excepted, — for they 
stretch from the pantry to the parlour. Acton Bell's 
fine lady indiscreetly pours forth her confidence at table, 
regardless of the presence of the footman, who preserves 
an inflexible wooden expression of countenance the 
while; and a remonstrant is silenced with the assur- 
ance, " Oh, no matter ! I never care about the footmen : 
they're mere automatons : it's nothing to them what 
their superiors say or do ; they won't dare to repeat it;" 
and even if they did, "it would be a pretty thing, in- 
deed, if we were to be tongue-tied by our servants.''' 
Mrs. Gore, on the other hand, singles out the Jeames 
class as foremost in mastering and in divulging a family 

ret, — their opportunities being so exceptionally great. 
Accompanying the carriage, conveying messages, etc., 
etc., Jeames is more confided in, though a less confi- 
dential servant, than the butler for instance, and is able 
to announce a flirtation in the family to the housemaid 
at least a fortnight before the butler drops a diplomatic 
hint to the housekeeper. 

Fielding thinks people always deceive themselves who 
imagine they can hide trouble and embarrassment from 
their servants, " for these are always extremely quick on 
»ns." Jotting down in his Diary a confi- 
dential colloquy with an unnamed friend, about a recent 

indal, horrible in its complication and issues, Sir Wal- 
ter Scott appends the remark : "All that was whispered 
is true -a sign how much better our domestics are ac- 
quainted with the private affairs of our neighbours than 
Richardson's Lovelace protests of servants at 
that nothing they know of their master, or of his 
ret from any one of their fellows or fol- 
lowers, — were it even a matter that would hang him. 

t of all our novelists of note it is -Mr. Thackeray who 



86 BLABS OF THE BASEMENT STORY. 

has most pointedly and most persistently harped on this 
string, — a jarring one. Our lackeys sit in judgment on 
us, he says in Esmond : my lord's intrigues may be 
ever so stealthily conducted, but his valet knows them ; 
and my lady's woman carries her mistress's private his- 
tory to the servants' scandal-market, and exchanges it 
against the secrets of other abigails. When little Raw- 
don Crawley gasped out at various intervals significant 
exclamations of rage and grief, which told against his 
mother, " the cook looked at the housemaid ; the house- 
maid looked knowingly at the footman ; the awful kit- 
chen inquisition which sits in judgment in every house, 
— and knows everything, — sat on Rebecca at that mo- 
ment/' At the disturbing episode which ruffled the 
smooth surface of a certain wedding at St. George's, as 
related in The Newcomes, John jeered at Thomas, we 
are told, and William turned his powdered head and 
signalled Jeames, who answered with a corresponding 
grin ; and the author dares say that little history was 
discussed at many a dinner-table that day in the base- 
ment story of several fashionable houses. " Young peo- 
ple " he elsewhere apostrophizes with the caution, that 
when they think they are managing their " absurd little 
love-affairs ever so quietly, Jeames and Betsy in the 
servants' hall are very likely talking about them." 
When Colonel Newcome, a ruined man, had to break up 
his establishment, his dismissal of Martin and his com- 
rades by no means took those worthies by surprise : 
they had been expecting this catastrophe quite as long 
as the Colonel himself, who thought he had kept his 
affairs so profoundly secret. And readers of Vanity Fair 
will easily recall to mind an exclamation of awe at the 
range and rigour of " that servants' inquisition " — how 
the characters of the visitors have been talked over by 
functionaries in white waistcoats on the landing, and 






*IN THE MULTITUDE OF COUXSELLORS: S7 

retainers in various uniforms in the hall — the man who 
brings you refreshment and stands behind your chair 
discussing you with the large gentleman in motley- 
coloured clothes at his side. We see Discovery walking 
respectfully up to my lady yonder, in the shape of a 
huge powdered man with large calves and a tray of ices 
— and Calumny behind him, in the shape of the hulking 
fellow carrying the wafer biscuits ; and we know that 
her secret will be talked over by those men at their club 
at the public-house to-night. The suggestion sounds 
plausible, that some people ought to have mutes for 
servants in Vanity Fair — mutes who cannot write ; for it 
follows the warning, If you are guilty, tremble: that 
fellow behind your chair may be a Janissary with a 
bowstring in his plush breeches pocket. 



IX. 

COUNSELLORS MANY, AND TOO MANY. 
Proverbs xi. 14, xxiv. 6. 

PROBABLY one is more struck, on reflection and in 
reading, with the exceptions to the rule, than with 
confirmatory examples of it, that in the multitude of 
ellors there is safety. The advantage of a council is 
intimated in one of the proverbs of the Sheviri attributed 
ilmah : " Four fishes smelt at the bait and turned 
their tails to it: one fish came by and swallowed it;" 
of which proverb one of the Friends in Council, and the 
critical, approvingly says that he has himself ob- 
:uch easier it is to delude fish when they 
;ly than when they come three or four together, 
and are fishes in council. And of the three leading 

Imah we are told, that to get the good that 



88 IN THE MULTITUDE OF COUNSELLORS 

was really to be got out of these men, you must have 
mastered the peculiar bent of each of their minds, which 
prevented each one of them, taken by himself, from 
being a perfect counsellor; but which did not prevent 
their being of great use as individual members of a 
council. But it is noteworthy, that when the realm was 
in danger, and the council therefore met at once, the 
first thought of Realmah was a patriotic determination 
to get rid of the greater part of his council, and to con- 
duct the war in the plenitude of despotic authority. A 
modern historian finds in the unlicensed discretion re- 
posed by the Roman Senate in the general, the most 
efficient aid to the extent of early Rome's conquests ; 
for war requires in a leader all the licence of a despot ; 
and triumph, decision, and energy can only be secured 
by the unfettered exercise of a single will. And he 
points, by way of contrast, to the modern republics of 
Italy, as denying themselves scope for large conquests 
by their extreme jealousy of their commanders, often 
wisely ridiculed by the great Italian historians ; an 
order from the Senate being almost indispensable before 
a baggage cart could move or a cannon be planted. 
One thing Salathiel speedily settled : the first assemblage 
of his confederate chieftains satisfied him of the absurdity 
of councils of war. Every man had his plan ; and every 
plan had some personal object in view. "I saw that to 
discuss them would be useless and endless." So he 
desired the proposers to reduce their views to writing ; 
received their memorials with perfect civility ; took them 
to his cabinet, and gave their brilliancy to add to the 
blaze of his fire. 

Good authorities in Roman history are of opinion that 
Pompey, in the war with Caesar, was superior to him in 
military tactics, and that, had he not been hampered 
by his colleagues, the result might have been different. 






IS THERE SAFETY? S9 

Charles the Seventh's policy in 1429 was to march 
boldly from Orleans to Rheims, before the English had 
recovered from their panic : so think modern critics, in 
confirmation of what was the counsel of the Pucelle 
alone, — at whose idea the royal counsellors smiled in 
contempt, — their counsel being to proceed slowly and 
surely, — in other words, to give the English time to re- 
cover their spirits. Anarchy in Antwerp is the heading 
of one of Mr. Motley's graphic pages; and a lively 
picture it offers us of the confusion that ensued when 
the hydra heads of the multitudinous government were 
laid together : the college of ward-masters, the college 
of select men, the college of deacons, the college of ship- 
building, of fortification, of ammunition, and of what not 
more, all claiming equal authority, and all wrangling 
among themselves ; not to forget, however, the college 
of " peace-makers," who wrangled more than all the 
rest put together. So true is it, that neither in politics 
nor in physic does the adage always hold good, that 

u ■ when any difficult work's to be done, 

Many heads can despatch it much better than one." 

The wit is on Lisette's side, whether the wisdom be 
on Sganare lie's or not, in that question and answer 
scene in Moliere : 

tte. voulez-vous done faire, monsieur, de quatre 

me'decins ? N'est-Ce pus a^sez d'un pour tuer 

une personne ? 
. Taisez-vous. Quatre conseils valent mieux qu 'un." 

One has heard of half being more- than tin- whole, and 
times the quarter may have the same advant 
in Drake's expedition of [595, there were too many 

nnand ; and after losing time in deb, tte which Sir 

Francis, il alone, would have spent in action, the)- were 

.e tip the attempt on the Canaries, with 

some Loss. The otherwise unaccountable inaction of De 



90 IN THE MULTITUDE OF COUNSELLORS 

Witt in 1 67 1 is explained at once when the anarchical 
constitution of the Dutch republic is remembered — its 
want of a central authority, and the fact that, to raise 
money or troops, the consent of a number of petty 
councils was necessary,. in the multitude of whose coun- 
cillors there was anything but safety. 

The quality of the counsel, and the ability of the 
counsellors, are elements of main import in the affirma- 
tion of the Wise King, that without counsel purposes 
are disappointed, but in the multitude of counsellors 
they are established. 

To Montesquieu it seems that the heads of the 
greatest of men become narrowed when they are 
gathered together, and that where the wise are over 
many, wisdom is correspondingly less. Let ou il y a plus 
de sages, il y a anssi 11 wins de sagesse. Butler's Hudi- 
brastics run to the same tune : — 

" For though most hands despatch apace, 
And make light work, the proverb says, 
Yet many different intellects 
Are found t' have contrary effects ; 
And many heads t' obstruct intrigues, 
As slowest insects have most legs." 

Lukewarm and timid counsels are said to prevail 
almost invariably with all small assemblies of men upon 
whom a serious responsibility is thrown ; whereas rash 
counsels are often adopted in large assemblies, because 
in them a sense of individual responsibility is lost in 
numbers. 

At Plassey, Give, for the first and last time in his life, 
called a council of war ; and, true to the adage, the 
council refused to fight. " If I had abided by its de- 
cision," said Clive, in his evidence before the House of 
Commons, "it would have been the ruin of the East 
India Company." One of his critical biographers re- 






WHOSE IS THE SAFETY? 



cognizes the same truth as holding good in all ages, 
and in all transactions, civil and military, when vigour 
and decision are requisite to success ; the shelter of 
numbers being never sought but by those who have 
not the moral courage to act on their own conviction ; 
is true intrepidity of mind never seeks to divide 
responsibility. " In the multitude of counsellors there 
may be safety; but," says Alison,* "it is in general 
safety to the counsellors, not to the counselled." Shak- 
speare's remonstrant envoy to the English nobles utters 
a ringing note in every line of his remonstrance — 

"And, whilst a field should be despatched and fought. 
You are disputing of your generals. 
One would have lingering wars, with little cost ; 
Another would fly swift, but wanteth wings ; 
A third man thinks, without expense at all, 

guileful fair words peace may be obtained. 
Awake, awake, English nobility ! n 

Pitiable was the plight of more than one Austrian 
commander, himself brave and intelligent, during the 

• )f the French Revolution and Empire, when, as 
Dr. Croly describes the status quo, he must wait for the 
opinion of other men — men too far off to know a single- 
fact of the campaign ; too blind to see it, if they were 
on the spot ; and tuo jealous even of their own general 
to suffer him to beat the enemy, if victory would throw 

nothingness into the shade. The sue of the 

• Dr. ->aid it before Sir Archibald J and how many 

>re Dr. < ',-. Laleigh 

King Walter for 

to the sick Earl of Sussex, then 

skilful hands of Way'and Smith. " Know'st thou not the 
. 'In the multitude of counsel there i 

iid Walter, " but I h ive heai I 

that tfa ;>oken of is for the i for the patient" 



92 NON-EXECUTIVE BOARDS. 

allies were too rapid for their cabinets, and the " stiff- 
skirted and antiquated privy councillors of Vienna and 
Berlin " stopped the way ; couriers were busy while 
soldiers were yawning themselves to death ; pioneers 
stood pickaxe in hand, waiting the order to break 
ground ; and the only war carried on was in the dis- 
contents of the military councils. 

John Balfour, of Burley, has gained a main point 
when he succeeds in persuading the wiser of his friends 
that the counsellors of their party are too numerous, 
and that they cannot expect the Midianites to be, by so 
large a number, delivered into their hands. " They have 
hearkened to my voice, and our assemblies will be 
shortly reduced within such a number as can consult 
and act together." Mr. Carlyle's pronounced preference 
of one man " with an eye," and a stout arm, and a strong 
will of his own, to any amount of parliament and pala- 
ver, would have come home to the business and bosoms 
of such as Burley in their day. 

The contrast is often quoted between the Academy, 
whose forty members took fifty-six years to compile 
the French Dictionary, and Dr. Johnson, who alone com- 
piled the English one in eight. Side by side with the 
Emigration Board, under whose management hundreds 
were dying of fever from close packing, and under 
whose licence were sailing vessels which, like the Wash- 
ington, were the "homes of fraud, brutality, tyranny, 
and obscenity," Mr. Herbert Spencer some years ago 
compared Mrs. Chisholm's beneficent enterprise, and 
from the comparison drew conclusions of practical mo- 
ment. An Executive Board, even supposing it to com- 
bine every element of talent and experience, has been 
pronounced little better than an ingenious contrivance 
for eluding the fair accountability of a governing body 
to those whose interests it represents. " As to the no- 



CHARITY COMMITTEES AXD COMMON SEXSE. 93 

bodies and lay figures who form so large a section of 
every railway board, they silently consume their sherry 
and biscuits, acquiesce in all the chairman's suggestions, 
endorse the contractor's schemes, maintain a dignified 
air of puzzled wisdom, and pocket the guineas which 
the secretary hands to them with a sweet sense of 
official fatigue, which the apprehended ruin of a thou- 
sand shareholders does not embitter or disturb." Then 
again, of charity committees and the like it has been 
said that utter helplessness is their most curious char- 
acteristic ; that, animated by a sincere desire to do a 
deal, the}- seldom contrive to get beyond the 
preliminary of talking; but every evil must work 

n cure, and by this time benevolent and charitable 
people are confessedly coining to see the absolute im- 
potence of a numerous body of men for carrying on the 
details of business, and to resign themselves to the 

sity of a more concentrated agency — though com- 
plaints are still rife, that the custom of confiding the 
administration of all benevolent undertakings to a 

body <>f men is in some quarters retained with a 
tenacity against which the teachings of experience are 

It was of a joint-stock' literal')' undertaking that Gib- 
bon was thinking when he remarked, that the operations 
ety are often perplexed by the divisions of 
sentiments and characters, as well as often retarded by 
f talent and application. A recent essayist 
immon Sense observes that it does not work in 
numbers, and will not act freely in consultations, COm- 
ially, in large numbers ; a thousand 

fairly sensible people will, under the pressure of con- 
htfully foolish thing at which each acting 
alone would stand 



X. 

THE SURE SIDE OF SURE1YSHIP. 
Proverbs xi. 15. 

PRUDENTIAL morality, with the prudential ele- 
ment at least as largely present and as actively 
efficient as the moral, is the characteristic, not only of 
very many proverbs of the world worldly, all the wide 
world over, but of not a few in the sacred Book of 
Proverbs itself. Some of these would seem to be best 
read, for purposes of Christian edification, with the Ser- 
mon on the Mount by way of a corrective. 

Among such is the proverb on the perils of suretyship. 
"He that hateth suretyship is sure;" "and he that is 
surety for a stranger shall smart for it." " A man void of 
understanding striketh hands, and becometh surety in the 
presence of his friend." " Be not thou one of them that 
strike hands, or of them that are sureties for debts." 
" Take his garment that is surety for a stranger," etc. 
There is only, the maxims go to show, one sure side of 
suretyship ; and that is the outside. Keep out of it alto- 
gether. He that hateth it is sure. He only that will 
have nothing to do with it is safe. 

Mr. Crabb Robinson, mildly free in thinking, and in 
journalizing his thoughts, was once "unpleasantly" 
affected in Yarmouth parish church by " a verse from 
Proverbs, read by the preacher/'' the verse, in fact, which 
is now under our notice. And what suggested itself as 
remarkable to the heterodox listener was, that no enemy 
to revealed religion should have attacked it by means 
of a novel or poem, in which mean and detestable cha- 
racters should be made to justify themselves by precepts 
found in the Bible. A work of that kind, he considered, 






THE SURE SIDE OF SURETYSHIP. 95 

would be insidious, and not the less effective because a 
superficial objection ; but some share of the reproach he 
would assign to the theologians who "neglect to dis- 
criminate between the spiritual or inspired, and the 
unspiritual or uninspired, parts of the sacred writings." 
The worl m of the text in question he accepted 

as past disputing, and if found in the works of a Franklin 
■uld greet it as unobjectionable, — " for he was the 
philosopher of prudence ; " but Mr. Robinson could not 
. that such a lesson should be taught us 
the word of God/'' Xcr could he refrain, even in 
church, from giving m to that regret. For, 

turning to his companion, Mr. Dawson Turner, he 
" Is that the word of God ?" 
44 All bankers thin was the apt reply. However 

unspiritual the text, this response was spiritucl enough. 
_e to what good purpose holy George Herbert, as 
spiritual as he was spiritucl, could turn the text, by way 
of doctrine and instruction in righteousness. Having 
counselled the putting of a friend in one's bosom, and 
:hs of life and death even, to prove one's 
to him, he goes on to say : — 

be not surety, if thou be a father. 

is a personal debt. I canno: 
jhildren's ri rt r ht, nor ought he I :her 

is should die, than hinder them to 
Fathers first enter bonds to nature's ends; 
1 arc her sureties, ere they are a frienci 

With the unmarried, ccst autre ch - . . But even then 
George Herbert prescribes limits 1 -hip, an 

indiscriminate hazard. He was not oblivious 
of th hich his con- 

temp nne refers, in a similitude in 01 

S tO 

■ prisoners, which whole months will swear. 
That only suretyship hath brought them the 



96 THE SURE SIDE OF SURETYSHIP. 

To Thales is ascribed the Greek proverb, Be surety, 
and mischief is close at hand : iyyva, Trdpean 8' cctt] — or, 
as the Latin paraphrase of it runs, with equal terseness : 
Sponde, noxa prcEsto est. Beware of suretyship for thy 
best friends, the great Lord Burghley advises : " He that 
payeth another man's debts, seeketh his own decay." 
But some there is no teaching. Some, experience itself, 
best of schoolmasters, quite fails to teach. Good- 
natured people, that can't say No, are in this respect 
apt to be impenetrably indocile. It has been said there 
was never a row of chestnuts roasting at the fire for 
w T hich your good-natured oaf will not stretch out his 
hand at the bidding and for the advantage of a friend. 
" Experience teaches the poor oaf nothing ; not even 
that fire burns." To put his name at the back of a bill, 
"just as a mere form;" to lend his money, just for a few 
days ; or to do any other sort of self-immolating folly 
on the faithful promise that the fire will not burn nor 
the knife cut — it all comes as easy to men of the good- 
natured sort as their alphabet. Indeed, it is truly said 
to be their alphabet, " out of which they spell their own 
ruin ; " but so long as the impressionable temperament 
lasts, so long as the liking to do a good-natured action 
is greater than caution or the power of analogical reason- 
ing, so long, — it is safely predicted, — will the oaf make 
himself the catspaw of the knave, till at last he has left 
himself no fingers wherewith to pluck out the chestnuts 
for himself or another. No such catspaw is the small 
Lanarkshire laird, Hamilton by name, of whom the 
story runs, that, being importuned by a neighbour to put 
his name to "a bit bill" for twenty pounds at three 
months' date, he was resolute with his " Na, na, Tammas, 
I canna do that." " It's a sma' affair to refuse me, 
laird." "Weel, ye see, Tammas, if I was to pit my 
name til't, ye wad get the siller frae the bank, and when 



ACCEPTIXG A BILL FOR A FRIEXD. 97 

the time came round, ye wadna be ready, and I wad hae 
to pay't ; sae then you and me wad quarrel, sae we may- 
just as weel quarrel the noo, as lang's the siller's in ma 
pouch." Jerrold's Montague St. George mellifluously 
solicits his "dear Richards " to accept a bill of his for a 
cool hundred and fifty- : he has many acquaintance, he 
tells his dear Richards, any of whom would have gone 
through the little form, " for it is only a form." But no : 
that would be treason to his friend : the writer owns 
himself apt to be imaginative, and thus it is to him a 

I and peculiar pleasure to fancy both their names 
linked indissolub' er — the union legalized by a 

stamp — each name adding value to the other by being 
paired. u Thus, it almost seems to me, that we merge 

s duIs into one — that in very truth, by the potent 
spell of friendship, we are no longer single, but bound 
together by a bond unknown to those pagans of the 
ancient time, Orestes and Pylades, Damon and Pythias !" 
But the dear Richards is not to be so wheedled out of 
hard cash : he agrees that friendship is a divine thing ; 
indeed, to his mind, so divine is it, that it should never 
be mixed up with money. His " friend's" picture of the 

n of souls, when both the souls' hands are to the 

bill, he owns to be beautiful and arfecting ; but it 

rs to him that the sheriff cares not for souls, only 

they are in bodies. " Now, unhappily, 

so far as we know, disembodied souls do not dra 

accept ; otherwise, what felicity would it be to me to 

and mingle with your spirit on a five-shilling 

stamp!" Of cour » to think that by the 

alchemy of a few ink-dro: Is could put a 

hundred and fifty gold p; count) in 

>f a friend. Alas ! he pr the ceremony 

I ended with ink, he I spend a Black 

upon him. Richards too is apt to be imaginative, and 

H 



98 ACCEPTING A BILL. 

imaginations fly not always together. Would their two 
souls be united, supposing him to accept the bill ? Only 
too closely, perhaps. " For three months I should feel 
ourselves growing together, every day strengthening the 
process. I should feel as if I breathed for two ; nay, I 
should hardly turn in my bed unincumbered. I should, 
in my fancy, become a double man with only single 
strength to bear about my added load." His accom- 
plished and suasive, but not quite persuasive, corre- 
spondent knows the story of Sinbad and the Old Man 
of the Mountain ? That is a fine allegory,' Mr. John 
Richards suggests, — though not generally understood. 
The truth is, on this expositor's showing, that the Old 
Man drew a bill, and Sinbad — guileless tar ! — accepted 
it. Lord Skindeep, in Bubbles of a Day, is, if more than 
equally sentimental, more practically common-place, 
in his evasion of speculator Smoke's request : — 

" Smoke. I knew the kindness of your heart. You'll assist me ? 
Skind. Anything I can do for my fellow-man ; but for you, 

Smoke, heart and pocket both are open to you. For your sake 

alone, I wish both were equally full. 
Smoke. My lord, I wouldn't touch your pocket for the world ; I 

reverence your heart ; and all I want is one half-minute's use 

of your right hand. 
Skind. {Grasping his hand) You have it, Smoke, — you have it; 

and my best wishes with it. 
Smoke. I knew you'd not refuse me. Here's the bill. {Pre- 
senting it.) 
Skind. {Taking paper, looking at it, and, affecting a burst of 

emotion, returning it to Smoke.) You didn't mean it, but 

you've struck me to the soul. 
Smoke. What's the matter ? This emotion at the sight of a mere 

bill is — {aside ; just three months too soon. It's like weeping 

at an onion — in the seed.) " 

George Colman finds proper space in his Autobio- 
graphy for his entanglements in bill transactions, while 
yet under age, with another in that sense /z^/zagenarian, 



BOUXD FOR A FRIEND. 99 

a brother collegian at Oxford, subsequently a clerical 
dignitary, who one morning wrote " enclosing his draught 
upon me for five hundred pounds, which he desired me 
to accept, as a matter of course, that he might complete 
a loan.'' Young George the Younger, in the flush of 
youthful friendship, and in blissful ignorance of worldly 
business and cares, subscribed the bills without hesita- 
tion, and sent them back by return of post. A few 
days afterwards his Christ Church chum forwarded to 
, him from town a second letter, containing further bills 
to the same amount for his acceptance, stating that 
there was some informality in the first draughts, which 
were therefore useless. He accepted de novo ; and thus 
the notes for five hundred were encored, as he phrases it, 
the tune of a thousand ; for his friend, as unpractised 
in the ways of the world as himself, had fallen into the 
clutches of a scoundrel money-scrivener. The moral is 
the old story, the imprudence of becoming " bound for 
a friend." It is so hard for some young friends to say 
1 hard while yet they are in what Cleopatra calls 
their salad days, when they are green in judgment, 
lant Green freshmen, with the world before them, 
not behind. Hut to say No, in such cases, and still more 
to say No in after life, when by family re- 
nsibilities a man has given hostages to fortune, is to 
appointments of the kind which an essayist 00 
ippointments classes with such as the kindest hearts 
will have no sympathy with, and failures over which we 
without malignity rejoice ; for who feels very deeply 
either for the disappointed burglar, who retires from 
r dwelling-house at three in the morning, leaving a 
the calf of his leg in the jaws of your trusty 
h-dog, or for the disappointed friend who "with 
from your stud)-, having failed to 
1 to attach your signature to a bill for some 



ioo ACCEPTING A BILL FOR A FRIEND. 

hundreds of pounds 'just as a matter of form.' Very 
likely he wants the money ; so did the burglar : but is 
that any reason why you should give it to him ? " You 
are counselled to refer him to the wealthy and influen- 
tial relatives of whom he has frequently talked to you, 
and who are the very people to assist him in such a 
case with their valuable autograph : as for yourself, you 
have children and self to think of and to care for ; and 
in them you have a good reason for hating suretyship, 
and a good hater of that goes the only way to be sure. 
The experienced author of Caxtoniana apostrophizes 
his " young friend," be he patrician or plebeian, who 
reads those essays, and plies him with earnest monitions 
to learn to say No at the first to the charming ac- 
quaintance who jauntily asks for his name to a bill. 
Allowing that Damon can pay the money, are his other 
obligations in life such as to warrant the sacrifice to 
Pythias — or rather to some Dionysius in the background ? 
What careers bright in promise this Mentor claims to 
have seen close in jail or in exile ; what talents, profuse 
in their blossom, die off without coming to fruit ; what 
virtues the manliest rot into vices the meanest — which, 
when one cried in amazement, " How account for s( 
doleful an end to so fair a commencement ? " — solve 
their whole mystery in this : " Damon never recoverec 
his first fatal error ; Damon put his name to a bill b] 
which Pythias promised to pay so and so in three 
months." In various of his novels Lord Lytton givt. 
pointed illustration to the doctrine. Frank Hazeldeai 
is in a fair (or foul) way of going to the bad when he 
has to lament his getting involved with that "poor 
Borrowell " who got into such a scrape at Goodwood : 
he could not resist " poor Borrowell " — a debt of honour, 
that must be paid : " so when I signed another bill for 
him, he could not pay it, poor fellow ! Really he would 



WARNING EXAMPLES IN FICTIOX. 101 

have shot himself if I had not renewed it. And now it 
is swelled to such an amount with that cursed interest, 
that lie can never pay it ; and one bill, of course, begets 
another — and to be renewed even- three months," etc. 
In a later fiction from the same fluent pen we read the 
counsel, Be to your friend what you please except 
security for him. M Orestes never asked Pylades to help 
him to borrow at fifty per cent." The Colonel in WJiat 
He Do with It! tells Lionel, "No man has more 
friends than I have ; never did I lose one — never did I 
sign a bill. Your father pursued a different policy ; 
he signed many bills — and lost many friends."' Mr. 
Trollope is as pronounced a teacher by example and 
warning, to the same effect, as Lord Lytton himself. 
Charlie Tudor, in the Three Clerks, all too soon is 
ructed in the proper quarter how to get a brother 
clerk to draw a bill, how he is to accept it himself, 
and how his patron is to discount it for him, paying 
him real gold in exchange for his worthless signature : 
and capitally described is the young fellow's sense of 
something delightful in the feeling that he could make 

ime in this way, as great bankers 

of their itting it at the bottom of a scrap of 

:r. The Vicar in Framley Parsonage is another 

litful example." Mr. Sowerby adroitly secures 

ntlemanly parson's name to a bill for ,{"400. 

►rry to demur to the loan, at first, protesting that 

he b 1 hundred, no, not fifty pounds by him 

in the world. Of course he has not. Mr. Sowerby 

men don't walk about the streets with ^400 in 

their pockets. What is it Mr. Sowerby wants then 3 

Why, tlie Vicar's name, to be sure. " Believe me, my 

. I would not a^k you really to put your 

ich a tune as that. Allow 

me to draw on you for that amount at three months. 



102 PUTTING ONES NAME TO A BILL. 

Long before that time I shall be flush enough.'''' And 
then, before Mark Robarts can answer, Mr. Sowerby 
has a bill stamp and pen and ink out on the table before 
him, and is filling in the bill as though his friend had 
already given his consent. Reluctantly the clergyman 
at last takes the pen and signs the bill ; the first time in 
his life he has ever done such an act, and, after being 
shaken cordially by the hand of Sowerby, walks off to 
his own bedroom a wretched man ; as well he may be, 
the sequel shows. It is of the Sowerby species that the 
author of the Eustace Diamonds somewhere affirms 
that if there be an existence of wretchedness on earth it 
must be that of the elderly worn-out roue who has run 
this race of debt and bills of accommodation and accept- 
ances, — of what, in good broad English, should be 
called "lying and swindling, falsehood and fraud/' — 
and who, having ruined all whom he should have loved, 
having burnt up every one who would trust him a little, 
is at last left to finish his life with such bread and water 
as these men get, without one honest thought to 
strengthen his sinking heart, or one honest friend to 
hold his shivering hand. If a man could only think of 
that, as he puts his name to the first little bill, as to 
which he is so good-naturedly assured that it can easily 
be renewed ! 

When Lawrence Fitzgibbon asks Phineas Finn, on a 
sofa in the corner of the smoking-room, to put his name 
to the back of a bill for two hundred and fifty pounds 
at six months' date, " But, my dear Lawrence," is the 
reply, " two hundred and fifty pounds is a sum of money 
utterly beyond my reach."" " Exactly, my dear boy," 
is the ready rejoinder, "and that's why I've come to 
you. D'ye think Pd have asked anybody who by any 
impossibility might have been made to pay anything 
for me ? " " But what's the use of it then ? " " All the 



BORROU'IXG YOUR FRIEXD'S NAME. 103 

use in the world. It's for me to judge of the use, you 
know. I'll make it of use, my boy. And take my word, 
you'll never hear about it again. It's just a forestalling 
of salary; that's all." And Phineas Phinn with many 

with much inward hatred of himself for his 
own weakness, did put his name on the back of the bill 
which Lawrence Fitzgibbon had prepared for his sig- 
nature. And of course he did hear of it again ; almost 
indeed it seemed as if he never were to hear the last of 
it, never to get over it, or out of it. 

rowing your friend's name, as a discourser on bill 
transactions has said, you place your own at his dis- 
posal ; and the bargain is no equal one if he is already 
r head and ears : thenceforward you begin the 
glissade on the ice-slope, where your most strenuous 
exertions can at best only retard the inevitable catas- 
trophe : if you had no ready money before, you are 
never likely to have it again ; and, in fact, it is all over 
with you, with your prospects and peace of mind. You 

Colonel Morley, by what you call trusting a 
friend, that is, aiding him to self-destruction — " buying 
him arsenic to clear his complexion" — and end by 
dragging all near you into your own abyss, as a drowning 
man would clutch at his own brother. 



XL 
BRUTE LIFE HELD IN RIGHTEOUS REGARD. 
Proverbs xii. 10. 

WHAT the cruelty of the wicked is, at its worst, 
and theirs, words might seem wanting to show, 
after it has been said that even the tender mercies of 
the wicked are cruel. But " a righteous man regardeth 
the life of his beast." Jacob, as flockmaster, is studiously 
careful for his flocks and herds as well as for his tender 
children : " if men should overdrive them one day, all 
the flock will die. - " So, " I will lead on softly," said he 
to Esau his brother, " according as the cattle that goeth 
before me be able to endure." The angel of the Lord, 
standing in the way, rebukes Balaam for smiting his ass 
these three times : that unrighteous man, wishing there 
were a sword in his hand, too literally regardeth not the 
life of his beast. The law of Moses forbids muzzling 
the ox that treadeth out the corn. And the righteous 
Lord, — shall not the Judge of all the earth do right ? — 
remembers in sparing Nineveh, and as a reason for 
sparing it, the " much cattle " of that great city. 

Considering how mainly the Arab depends for safety 
and life upon the speed and vigour of his horse, it is 
no way surprising to find the commentators on the 
Koran saying that the Arab is bound to love his horse 
as himself, and to devote to him, when necessary, the 
food provided for his children. One such authority, 
quoted by the Emir Abdel Kader, says that whoever 
feeds and cherishes a horse for the love of God will be 
counted among the number of those who are charitable 
among men, his sins will be forgiven him, and he will be 
rewarded hereafter. 



WELL TEXDED STEED. 105 

We see and hear the humourist Golden*, in Soulie's 
Le Toulouse, u addressant des questions pleines 
d'interet aux deux chevaux sur la qualite de l'orge, du 
foin, de la paille qu'on leur avait servis," in their curious 
and dubious quarters. William Penn, at the close of 
the Imaginary Conversation with Peterborough, sum- 
mons his helper Abel, who stands expecting him, and 
knitting hose, to take his mare and feed her. Has Abel 
din-. Is he hungry : Yea Greatly ? 

[Penn's] house none hungereth painfully : but 
;!y at this hour my appetite waxeth sharp. 
/. Feed thou first this poor good creature, the which is 
accustomed to eat oftener than thou art, and the 
which haply hath fasted long 

Captain Dalgetty refuse- the proffered assistance ot 
those at the castle of Darnlinvarach who wish to relieve 
him of the charge of his horse. "It is my custom, my 
e Gustavus (for so I have called him, after 
my invincible master) accommodated myself: we are 
old friends and fellow-travellers, and as I often need 
the use of his legs. I always lend him in my turn the 
1 »f my tongue, to call for whatever he has oc- 
and accor ild strides into the 

stable afl I, without further apology. Later in 

the _• come upon the master looking on the 

animal with great complacency for about five mint: - 
while the latter is b a large measur 

com which he has filled for it with the 

char | returning his caresses, by licking tli 

ministrant hancN and that m which beams 

benediction as the mouth utters it, " Much good may it 
" heart, I And when, some 

chapters later, the veteran h G tavus in the 

han brecchless " gillie, \n order to save his own 

life, "Och, och!" is his cry, " -ay 



106 THE MERCIFUL MAN 

at Mareschal College, must I leave Gustavus in such 
grooming? ... If you knew but the value of 
Gustavus, and the things we two have done and suffered 
together ! See, he turns back to look at me ! — Be kind 
to him, my good breechless friend, and I will requite you 
well." 

Another of Sir Walter's fictions offers us another 
careful rider who cares well for his steed. That is 
Tyrell, in St. Ronaris Well, who gives such strict 
charges on alighting at the Cleikum Inn, touching the 
comfort of his horse — that he be unbridled, and put 
into a clean and cozy stall, the girths slacked, and a 
cloth cast over his loins ; but that the saddle be not 
removed till the master himself come to see him dressed. 
Anon we have the guest giving general directions to 
Mistress Dods, followed by, " Meantime, I will go see 
after my horse." " The merciful man," quoth Meg, 
when he is gone, " is merciful to his beast. — He had aye 
something about him by ordinar, that callant," whom, as 
a callant, she had known and liked so well in auld lang 
syne. Acompanying Tyrell to the stable, we see and 
hear him saluted by his horse with feathering ears, 
and that low amicable neigh, with which the approach 
of a loving and beloved friend is greeted ; and we see 
that he sees the faithful creature in every respect duly 
attended to. Meg Dods is not the only enunciator of 
the proverb in this tale ; at the tragical close of it, we 
find the caustic old nabob, Mr. Touchwood, refusing to 
let the hired horses go further, in avowed respect for it : 
"The poor carrion are tired, and the merciful man is 
merciful to his beast." The mediaeval writer of Latin 
prose, Bernardus Silvester, has been commended as one 
of the few in those days — enough, however, to make a 
catena — who could feel for the sufferings of dumb 
animals. " Considera itaque de cibo et de potu animal- 



IS MERCIFUL TO HIS BEAST. 107 

ium tuorum, nam esuriunt et non petunt." Is it because 
the brutes are dumb, George Eliot starts the suggestive 
query, that we are apt to be kinder to the brutes that 
love us than to- the women that love us ? — a query 
referring to Adam Bede and his dog Gyp, on that 
night when his an^er made Adam less tender than 
usual to his mother, but did not prevent him from 
caring as much as usual for his dog. 

All excerpt from the journal of the late Sir Henry 

.rence is thus introduced by one of his biographers, 

Herbert Edwardes : " Here we see him, though given 

to galloping, ' merciful to his beast :' — ' La)' down on the 

floor for a quarter of an hour ; dressed and went to see 

my horse Conrad, who is my sole stand-by. He is a 

grey Arab, somewhat old, but still a good horse. . . . 

) much care of him that I suspect he will die. 

That he may come in cool, I always walk him the last 

three or four miles ; and as I walk myself the first 

hour, it is in the middle of the journey I get over the 

ground.' " 

The commandant in Balzac's Mtdecin de Catnpagne is 

mpt to follow his steed into the good cure's stable, 

"pour lui donner un coup d'ceil, et voir comment il 

allait s'y trouver '' — and a real pleasure it is to the 

to find in a well-kept stable, with plenty of 

litter, the cure's own steed in plump and prime condition, 

and mark* d by " I'air heureux et doux des campagnards, 

air qui fait reconnaitre un cheval de cure entre tous 

h vaux." it is an odd incident Mrs. Gaskell 

of the old minister who has included in his 

ning prayer a petition for the cattle and live 

d who, at the conclusion, before the family 

hav 1 their knees, speaks on his knees to a 

at, who turns round on his knees to attend : 
lidst see that Daisy had her warm mash to-night; 



108 MARCHEGA Y AND BUCEPHALUS. 

for we must not neglect the means, John — two quarts of 
gruel, a spoonful of ginger, and a gill of beer — the poor 
beast needs it, and I fear it slipped out of my mind to 
tell thee ; and here was I asking a blessing and neglect- 
ing the means, which is a mockery," said he, dropping 
his voice. 

In the old chanson de geste known to students of 
antiquarian French literature by the title of Aiol de 
Saint-Gilles, the old duke Elie is as fond of his famous 
destrier, the incomparable Marchegay, as of his son 
Aiol ; and when the latter returns from his adventures 
without the horse, and indeed declares Marchegay to be 
dead in the wars, vehement is the beau sires indigna- 
tion at the tone of the avowal — which however is only 
affected to try him, and to heighten the subsequent 
effect of a safe and happy restoration : — 

" Et Marchegay est mort, a sa fin est alle. 
Des longtemps Font mange les chiens dans un fosse. 
II ne pouvait plus courir, il dtait tout lourdant. — 
Quand Elie l'entend, peu s'en faut qu'il enrage : — 
Glouton, lui dit le due, mal l'osates vous dire 
Que Marchegay soit mort, mon excellent destrier, 
Jamais autre si bon ne sera retrouve'. 
Sortez hors de ma terre : n'en aurez one un pied." 

Whereupon Aiol gives the signal for the steed to be 
brought forward, all in goodly trappings and rich array: 

" Et devant lui il fit Marchegay amener, 
Le cheval etait gras, pleins avait les cote's, 
Car Aiol Tavait fait longuement reposer. 
Par deux chaines d'argent il le fait amener. 
Elie e'earte un peu son vetement d'hermine, 
Et caresse au cheval les flancs et les cote's." 

Was not Alexander just as fond of his Bucephalus ? 
showing as much regret, says Plutarch, when that 
gallant charger died, well stricken in years (thirty of 
them, by some accounts), as if he had lost a faithful 
friend and companion of the human race. 



5T DAYS OF AN OLD HORSE. 109 

Mr. Spectator sees the goodness of the master even in 
Sir Roger de Coverley's old house-dog, and in a grey 
pad that was kept in the stable with great care and 
tenderness, out of regard to his past services, though he 
had been useless for several years. The author of The 

r is eager to repudiate the supposition of Xobs 
ever having been made dog's-meat by his master, who 
had far too much regard for that good old horse, to let 

:nains be treated with such indignity, and too much 
of obligation and humanity to part with an old 
dumb servant when his i to fail, and con- 

sign him to the hard usage which " is the common lot of 

• ; )Oor creatures in this, in this respect, hardhearted 
and wicked nation." Xobs, we are assured, when his 
labour was past, had for the remainder of his days the 
run of the fields at Thaxted Grange; and when, in due 
course of nature, he died of old age, instead of being 
sent to the tanners and the dogs, he became, like 
" brav y," food for — worms: a grave was dug, 

wherein he was decently deposited, with his shoes on, 
and 1 and his master planted a horse-chestnut 

on th t thou been a bay fa N >bs, it 

would have been a bay-tree instead." As to "turning 
out" an <>ld horse into the fields for the rest of his days, 
Sir Francis Head, in TJte Horse ami //is Rider, makes 
merry at the expense of the "munificent gentlemen" 
ird the faithful services <>f an aged hunter; 
they might aim -.veil, he says, reward an old worn- 

out butler, or bent, decrepit, toothless housekeeper, by 
\g them both for the winter of their lives to the 
rkhouse ; where, at n to themselves, they 

WOUld ing, firin and raiment; 

iit cruelty he deems it, to turn out into a 

park a horse which not only loves 1. , and not 

only never wi leave it. but whenever he is taken 



no SUPERANNUATED STEEDS. 

out of it, even after a confinement of many weeks, 
evinces a desire to re-enter it ; if he could speak, he 
would tell you how poor a return it is for faithful service, 
to deprive him of the oats, beans, hay, bed, clothing, 
warm stable, and companions, to which he has been 
accustomed all his life. Else it is a pleasant picture 
Cowper paints of 

" The veteran steed excused his task at length, 
In kind compassion of his failing strength, 
And turned into the park or mead to graze, 
Exempt from future service all his days." 

Southey relates with a fine glow of fellow-feeling how 
Sir Robert Clayton, as commander of a troop of British 
cavalry which, after service on the Continent, was dis- 
banded in the city of York, and the horses sold, could 
not bear to think that his old fellow-campaigners, who 
had borne brave men to battle, should be ridden to 
death as butchers' hacks, or worked in dung-carts till 
they became dog's-meat, and who therefore purchased a 
piece of ground upon Knavesmire heath, and turned out 
the old horses to have their run there for life.* One of 
the best traits related by Roger North of his brother, the 
Lord Keeper Guilford, is, in the Doctor's opinion, that 
all his horses, — bred by himself, coming first to the 
husbandry as colts, and from thence, as they were fit, 
taken into his equipage, — when disabled for that service 
by age or accident, " were returned to the place from 
whence they came, and there expired." The Mummers' 
Song of Poor Old Horse exhorts all gentlemen and 
sportsmen, and men of courage bold, — 

* What made this honourable act of Sir Robert's to be the longer 
had in remembrance, was the curious fact, that one day when these 
horses were grazing, a thunderstorm gathered, at the fires and 
sounds of which, as if mistaken for the signs of approaching battle, 
they were seen to get together and form in line, almost in as per- 
fect order as if they had their old masters upon their backs. 



'AULD MARE MAGGIE: III 

..I you that's got a good horse, take care of him when old ; 
Then put him in your stable, and keep him there so warm ; 
Give him good corn and hay, pray let him take no harm. 
Poor old horse ! poor old hoi - 

lected one delivers himself of stanza after stanza 

in deprecation of the neglect from which he suffers : 

once he had his clothing of fine linsey-woolsey, and his 

well-combed tail and mane, and his shiny coat, and his 

plump round shoulders, to boast of; but now all is 

: and instead of the best corn and 

f >rced to nip whatever short com- 

- in the way of dry herbage he can find. 

u I used to be kept up all in a stable warm, 

zep my tender body from any cold or harm ; 
I'm turned out in the open fields to go, 
To face all kinds of weather, the wind, cold, frost, and snow ! 
Poor old horse ! poor old horse !" 

Burns indited a prevailing protest in favour of all such 

-'tit workers, in his Auld Farmer's Salutation to 

\uld Mare Maggie, on giving her the accustomed 

orn to hansel in the New Year. It's now 

: nine-and-twenty years " since she was his " guid 

father's meare," — a bunny gray, dappled, sleek, and 

glaizie ; though now " howe-backit, kna dowie, 

in' crazy." The auld master and the auld mare 

ther in fair weather and foul, "an wi 1 

irl' fought ;" and the master is not 

ird the mare at this time of day. 

\;ul think n;i, my auld, 'trusty 

That now perhaps thou' rvin, 

An' thy auld days may end ; 

my last t 
ipart,* I 'i! me 

Laid by for ) 



rt of ayfcti/— busheL 



ii2 OLD HORSES OF BURNS AND BURKE. 

« We've worn to crazy years thegither ; 
We'll toyte * about wi' ane anither ; 
Wi' tentie care I'll flit thy tether 

To some hain'd rig, 
Where ye may nobly rax your leather, 
Wi' sma' fatigue." 

Were the " auld meare " as deplorable an object as 
Petruchio's spavined steed, past cure of the fives and 
stark spoiled with the staggers, near-legged before, and 
swayed in the back, " possessed with the glanders, and 
like to mose in the chine," or as far-gone as the starved 
coursers at Agincourt in another Shakspearian definition, 
poor jades, that lob down their heads, drooping their 
hides and hips ; the gum down-roping from their pale- 
dead eyes, while " in their pale dull mouths the gimmal 
[ring] bit lies foul with chewed grass, still and motion- 
less, — and their executors, the knavish crows, fly o'er 
them all, impatient for their hour," — none the less, but 
all the more, would the Lowland farmer be kind to the 
jade, for auld lang syne. 

Sir James Prior tells us, in his last year of the life 
of Burke, that a feeble old horse, which had been a 
favourite with young Richard — now dead — and his con- 
stant companion in all rural journeyings and sports, 
when both were alike healthful and vigorous, was 
turned out to take the run of the park at Beaconsfield 
for the remainder of his life, the servants being strictly 
charged not to ride or in any way molest him. This 
poor old worn-out steed it was that one day drew near 
to Burke, as the now childless and decrepit statesman 
was musing in the park, and after some moments of 
inspection, followed by seeming recollection and confi- 
dence, deliberately rested his head upon the old man's 
bosom. " The singularity of the action, the remem- 

* Totter. 



SUPERAXXCATED STEEDS. 



brance of his dead son, its late master, and the apparent 

attachment and intelligence of the poor brute, as if it 

could sympathize with his inward sorrows, rushing at 

into his mind, totally overpowered his firmness ; 

and throwing his arms over its neck, he wept long and 

loudly." George Colman expatiates on the humanity 

of the once well-known Humphrey Morris, of Grove 

House, Turnham Green, whose mare Curious, almost a 

skeleton from old age, being turned of thirty, was 

tended with such noteworthy care, and so many indeed 

of whose horses enjoyed a luxurious sinecure ; for 

during summer they were turned into his paddock, 

where in sultry weather they reposed beneath the shade 

of tlie tree--, a boy being specially employed to flap the 

flies from their hides : the honours shown by Mr. Morris 

to his beasts of burden being pronounced inferior only 

to those which Caligula lavished on his charger. At 

Strathneldsaye died of old age, in peace and plenty, 

that famous Copenhagen which carried " the Duke" at 

rloo, fur fifteen hours without dismounting; there 

. the last ten years of his life in perfect freedom, 

there he was buried, and by his master's orders a salute 

ive. The Duchess is said to have 

! a bracelet made of Copenhagen's hair. 

late Mr. Assheton Smith's biographer duly n 

'.hen his horses had grown old, or were no longer 

to their work, they were permitted to mam at 

in the p. irl.. for their master never would sell an 

animal when worn out, to be .subjected, as he said, to 

•fill-treatment. We certainly ought not, 

lutarch, to treat living creatures like shoes or 

which, when worn out with use, we 

and were it only to learn benevolen 
inkind, we should be merciful to other creatures, 
rt," protests the fine old heathen — in 

I 



ii4 DIVERSE FATES OF WORN-OUT HORSES. 

this respect, like Garth, the best good Christian he, 
although he knew it not, — " For my part, I would 
not sell even an old ox that had laboured for me." 
John Howard writes home from the Lazaretto, himself 
sick and a prisoner : " Is my chaise-horse gone blind or 
spoiled ? Duke is well ; he must have his range when 
past his labour ; not doing such a cruel thing as I did 
with the old mare — I have a thousand times repented 
it" The third Duke of Queensberry would never allow 
one of his old horses to be killed or sold : they enjoyed 
free range in some parks near Drumlanrig ; and when 
the Duke died, and his " heartless successor," as he is 
called in Chambers's Traditions of Edinburgh, put up 
for sale all these luckless pensioners, a painful sight it is 
said to have been, that of the feeble and pampered 
animals, forced by their new masters to drag carts and 
do rough service, till they broke down and died on the 
roads and in the ditches. Many a one among them 
might have stood, or staggered, for the picture Mr. 
Browning so graphically draws, in his Childe Roland : — 

" One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare, 
Stood stupefied, however he came there — 
Thrust out past service from the devil's stud. 

" Alive ? he might be dead for all I know, 

With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, 
And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane. 
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe." 

The capital character-drawing of Squire Hamley, in 
Wives and Daughters, would not be complete without 
this characteristic, that his old carriage-horse Conqueror, 
turned out to grass as past regular work, used to come 
whinnying up to the park palings whenever he saw the 
Squire, who had always a piece of bread, or some sugar, 
or an apple, for the old favourite ; and would make many 



CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. 1 1 5 

a complaining speech to the dumb animal, telling him 
of the change of times since both were in their prime. 

To be kind to these our fellow-lodgers is common 

humanity. To be cruel to them is to be below it. It is 

almost if not quite to be a little lower than themselves. 

In his essay on the exercise of benevolence, Sir Arthur 

- to the whole animate creation 

as no unworthy part of it, while to such as we are 

rs of, for however short a time, we have positive 

perform. This may seem too obvious to be 

d upon ; but there are persons, as he says, who 

- though th Jit they could buy the right 

of ill-treating any of God's creation. It often occurs 

to Milverton, in going along the streets, how few men 

can be trusted with the whip even for animals. Elia's 

"inexplicable" cousin James took the whole animal world 

to be under his especial protection : a broken-winded 

.lied hor sure to find an advocate in 

him, and an over-loaded ass became his client for ever. 

calls him admiringly " the apostle to the brute 

kind" — the never-failing friend of those who have none 

to car them. The contemplation of a 

skinned alive, would wring him so, that 
"all for pity he could die." It would take the savour 

ind the rest from his pillow, 
and ni Sir Walter Scott liked to quote his wife's 

..int query whenever she saw a horse ill— 
r creature been guilty of in his 

Walter himself would fain hope 
such present sufferers had been carl 

i were only experiencin it of the 

they had formerly inflicted. We m 
sure that thur Hel it making Mil\ 

nan when he moves him to the 

that never shall he be happy or comfortable 



u6 CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. 

in this world while the lower animals are treated as 
they are ; and the friendliest of friends in council is 
humanely persuaded that his is not an exceptional 
case, but that there are tens of thousands of human 
beings who feel exactly as he does, and who, like him, 
if you were to amend all other evils, and yet resolve 
to leave this untouched, would not be satisfied. It is, 
he maintains, an immense responsibility that Providence 
has thrown upon us, in subjecting these sensitive crea- 
tures to our complete sway ; and he avowedly trembles 
at the thought of how poor an answer we shall have to 
give when asked the question how we have made use of 
the power entrusted to us over the brute creation. 
Earl Stanhope declared in his History of England his 
firm reliance on the progressive march of humanity, 
which in a barbarous age was confined to men of our 
religion, and within our own times extended only to 
men of our own colour, but which as time rolls on, 
he expressed his assurance, " will not be limited even 
to our kind ; " his assurance that we shall come to 
feel how much the brute-creation also is entitled t( 
our sympathy and kindness, and that any needless 01 
wanton suffering inflicted upon them will on ever} 
occasion arouse and be restrained by the public in- 
dignation and disgust. Cowper put heart and soul 
and strength into his lines on the penalties of depend- 
ence, in the case of creatures which, some in the fields 
of a human master, some at his crib, and some be- 
neath his roof, too often prove at how dear a rate h< 
sells protection. Witness the spaniel dying for som( 
venial fault, " under dissection of the knotted scourge," 
— and the patient ox, goaded on his way to the 
slaughter-house, — and the "flight-performing horse," 
who with such unsuspecting readiness takes 



A J EX ED QUESTION OF LA W, i r 7 

'" His murderer on his back, and pushed all day, 
With bleeding sides, and flanks that heave for life, 
To the far distant goal, arrives and dies. 
So little mercy shows who needs so much ! 

s law, so jealous in the cause of man, 

ounce no doom on the delinquent ? None. 
1 [e lives, and o'er his brimming beaker boasts 

if barbarity were high desert) 
The inglorious feat, and clamorous in praise 

the poor brute, seems wisely to suppose 
The honours of the matchless horse his own. 
It many a crime deemed innocent on earth 
istered in heaven, and these, no doubt, 
Have each their record, with a curse annexed. 
Man may dismiss compassion from his heart, 
But God will never." 

>n of interposing law has been a vexed 

. upon which the humanest have sometimes differed, 

if not agreed to differ. Tickler, of the Nodes, who 

cordially confounds all cruelty to animals, yet ques- 

is the efficacy of law to protect the lower creation 

inst the human, and would trust for that protection 

the moral indignation of the people; while Chris- 

h affirms the impossibility of defining cruelty 

animals 1 bring it within the salutary opera- 

of law, and is for every man taking the law 

. n hands wherever he sees horse or ass 

unmercifully beaten. Many a brute biped had John 

levelled in the streets in this style, by his own 

wal. On another of the Ambrosian Mights he 

anew the vexed question, and the Ettrick Shep- 

to "ken naething about legisla- 

n something about humanity 

— a: ■ 1 the dumb creation la practical bla 

my, and will not go unpunished." lint he opines 

i and preach it 
n, Dr. Chalmers had then recently delivered his 



n8 LEGISLATION FOR THE BRUTE CREATION. 

celebrated sermon on cruelty to animals — than fine it 
down or imprison it down, after the method of, Mr. 
Martin. Tickler suggests that habits of cruelty termin- 
ate almost of necessity in atrocious crimes ; the carter 
who brutally flogs his horse will beat his wife. The 
Shepherd does put in a plea, however, for some "very puir 
blackguard" who perhaps has bought the living skeleton 
of a horse for half-a-crown, that he may get a week's 
wear and tear out of it, and who " maun thump it, 
or it winna gang. The chiel may be sellin' saut or 
bread, or some ither lawful eatables, and trying to 
mainteen a family. It's a sair sicht to behold the raw 
and bloody skeleton — but what can ye do ? " In the 
case of " a weelful hulkin fallow, savage, for nae reason 
at a', against the beast intrusted to him," the pastoral 
prescription simply is, " knock him down wi' a stick 
or a stane aff the causeway — and if you fractur his 
skull, and he binna married, you've performed a good 
action, and by takin' the law into your ain hand, 
done the State some service." But on the other hand, 
so hard-headed and clear-headed and cool-headed a 
thinker as Mr. Stuart Mill is decisive and incisive in 
his arguments in favour of legal intervention. In the 
last chapter of his treatise on Political Economy, he 
declares it to have been by the grossest misunderstand- 
ing of the principles of liberty, that the infliction of 
exemplary punishment on ruffianism practised towards 
the defenceless lower animals has been treated as a 
meddling by Government with things beyond its pro- 
vince, an interference with domestic life. He asserts 
the domestic life of domestic tyrants to be one of the 
things which it is most imperative on the law to 
interfere with. He insists that what it would be the 
duty of a human being, possessed of the requisite 
physical strength, to prevent by force if attempted in 



KILLING FOR USE AXD KILLIXG FOR SPORT, ng 

his presence, it cannot be less incumbent on society 
generally to supp; 

Super-sentimental Bernardin de Saint-Pierre gains 
upon one's confidence in the attitude in which one of 
his biographers depicts him, when, one day, " il s'avan- 
c.ait le poing ferine avec menace contre un charretier 
qui maltraitait un chevaL" In the Diary of that 
pronounced lover of sport, Mr. Windham, we read, — 
the right honourable gentleman having taken shelter 
from the rain under a haystack in Chelsea (tempora 
mutantur) \ " Waterman boasting of cruelties practised 
on seals, under notion of fun. Reproved him, but 
not enough."' We cannot live without destroying 
animals, says Horace Walpole, in one of his Letters ; 
but shall we torture them for our sport — sport in their 

inaction? "One of the bravest and best men I 

ever knew, Sir Charles Wager, I have often heard 

declare he never killed a fly willingly." The question 

pecting the killing of animals Leigh Hunt takes 

to be soon settled with minds that are really willing 

ettle it, and not bent upon squaring their conclu- 

is with their inclinations : if we kill them out of 
necessity and for our own life's sake, " it is what Nature 

lently allows, and for the most part ordains ; if we 
port, we are taking an unfair advanl 

superior faculties, and our reason rebukes us. We 

• unnecessary pain, and injure our humanity by tak- 
an unhandsome pleasure." It is a point of honest 

le with Cooper's typical Deerslayer, that he never 
pulled ' on buck or doe, unless when food or 

clo: re wanting. Stoutly old Leather-si 

the " wasty " ways of pigeon-shooting gentry 

iit wicked : if a body, quoth he, has a crav- 

's flesh, why, it's made the same as all 

other creatures, for men's eating, but not to kill twenty 



120 CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. 

and eat one. " When I want such a thing, I go into 
the woods till I find one to my liking, and then I shoot 
him off the branches without touching a feather of 
another, though there might be a hundred on the same 
tree." Wordsworth's doctrine is comprehensive — 

" Never to blend our pleasure or our pride 
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels." 

Cowper would not enter on his list of friends the 
man, " though graced with polished manners and fine 
sense, yet wanting sensibility/'' who needlessly sets foot 
upon a worm. An inadvertent step, he reminds us, 
may crush the snail that crawls at evening in the 
public path, but he that has humanity, forewarned, 
will tread aside, and let the reptile live. The crawler 
in a private path Cowper's casuistry otherwise disposes 
of. The gentle influence of the Angel in the House 
upon her loyal laureate, in boyhood, involves this among 
other beneficent issues : 

" For me, hence weak towards the weak, 
No more the unnested blackbird's shriek 
Startled the light-leaved wood ; on high 
Wander'd the gadding butterfly, 
Unscared by my flung cap ; the bee, 
Rifling the hollyhock in glee, 
Was no more trapp'd with his own flower, 
And for his honey slain." 

Such a boy might La Fontaine accept as a bright 
particular exception to prove the rule of his verse, 
Mais un fripon <T enfant (cet age est sans pitie). Jean 
the fabulist was the very man of men to say ditto 
(in metre) to Bentham's averment, that it is as much a 
moral duty to regard the pleasures and pains of other 
animals as those of human beings. Morally speaking, 
cruelty to animals is by a later philosopher, equally 
free from sentimentalism, regarded as an indication of 
character almost worse than cruelty to men ; for there 









CONDEMNED ON UTILITARIAN GROUNDS. 121 

is a brutal hardness of disposition displayed in bully- 
ing defenceless creatures which is a qualification for 
the worst crimes: "A boy who begins by torturing a 
cat is in as fair a road to the gallows as he can very 
well strike out, and it is long odds that a costermonger 
who will maltreat his donkey will also beat his wife." 
Cruelty to a cat was the occasion of an indignant 
letter from Robert Southey to certain " young gentle- 
men, " a reading part\' from one of the Universities, 
who were spending "the long" of 1834 at Keswick, 
— misspending it by a systematic purchase of cats for 
irposes. Their sport, the laureate told them, 
was as blackguard as it was brutal. And his son tells 
how lie has seen his cheek glow, and his eye darken 
and almost flash fire, when he chanced to witness 
anything of the kind, — and heard him administer a 
rebuke which made the offender tremble. Mr. Lecky's 
I ion of a doubt whether cruelty to animals can 
demned on utilitarian grounds is met by the 
answer that a utilitarian may rationally in- 
clude in his definition of the greatest number whose 
to be the aim of human beings, not only 
human beings themselves, but all animals capable of 
lappy or the reverse; besides which it is urged 
that, if we limit our view to the good of our 

cies, the argument is as str< can be de- 

" If the criminality of an action were t<» be 
imply by its direct effect on human happi- 
probably hold that the murderer of a 
n-up man was worse than the murderer of a 
child, and far worse than the torturer of a dumb 
a matter <>f fact, we should probably 
r loathing for a man who could deliberately 
for his plea ;ure than for one who should 
ill-use one of his equals." For such cruelty is held 



'STUPENDOUS BRUTALITY: 



to indicate, as a rule, a baser nature : a murderer, 
though generally speaking a man of bad character, 
and at all events guilty of an unamiable weakness, 
is not of necessity cowardly or mean ; he may not 
improbably show some courage, and possibly even 
some sensibility to the nobler emotions. The tormentor 
of animals, on the other hand, shows callousness of 
nature, a pleasure in giving pain for the sake of giving 
pain, which has about it something only to be described 
as devilish. " The character which has become so 
debased as to be utterly insensible to the sight of pain 
in a helpless creature, or even to take pleasure in it, 
is certainly among the lowest conceivable types of 
humanity." An English reviewer of Burns has recently 
observed, that the " stupendous brutality which marks 
the very poor English people " — of course not univer- 
sally, but as a class — in dealings with dumb animals, 
would not be what it is if the spirit of that poet had 
much of a grip upon them. " The cruelty of the 
majority of carters, cab-drivers, dog-trainers, and the 
like makes a sensitive man shudder to think of, as 
Hogarth's pictures of Cruelty make him sicken in 
looking at them/'' Not but that civilization is telling 
upon all classes as well as nations. It is some years 
ago that Mr. Theophile Gautier complimented England 
upon having for a long time past taken precedence 
of France in this good way ; but it gladdened him to 
be able at least to add that Englishmen were no 
longer laughed at by the French for their love of dogs 
and horses, "theme ordinaire des caricatures de 1815." 
And he found encouragement in reporting progress 
from the dark ages, " le moyen age, dans ses tenebres," 
when dumb animals were so often an object of fear, 
and their speaking eyes supposed to be lighted up 
with demoniacal malice. An eloquent essay-writer on 



' UNREFLECTING DEVILISHXESS: 1 23 

sympathy with Nature welcomes the change from 
loathing and terror, in the presence of hideous and mon- 
strous shapes, to a cherished sense of gentle pity. 
John Foster declared it to be a great sin against moral 

to mention ludicrously, or for ludicrous compari- 
son, circumstances in the animal world which are pain- 
ful or distressing to the animals that are in them ; 
for instance, " Like a toad under a harrow." 
It is incr / seen and felt that these dumb and 

helpless things have a capacity for something which 
at lea s with them for pleasure. Who, it is 

asked, can forget, that has read it, the French poet's 
picture of the black venomous toad squatting meekly 
on the edge of its stagnant ditch on a summer evening, 
and relishing in its own humble way the calm of the 
Surrounding scene ? If there are plenty of people 
still to be found, as the essay asserts, who would scarcely 
leel that they were doing anything very wrong if they 
' r r d\\: the poor monster a poke with a stick, or set a dog on 

igue him, there are confessedly fewer people now 

of this "involuntary unreflecting devilishness " than 

quarter of a century since, and the whole 

ncy of the modern spirit is t<> make such people 

still, whatever may be the tendency of the modern 
spirit irds the doctrine of Coleridge, that he 

tli well who loveth well both man and bird and 

si who loveth 
All things both great .mil small ; 
that loveth 

He made and loveth all." 



XII. 

HOPE DEFERRED. 

Proverbs xiii. 12. 

THE fulfilled desire when it cometh may be a tree of 
life, but, meanwhile, " hope deferred maketh the 
heart sick." It may verily have its reward, its exceeding 
great reward, — 

"When Hope, long doubtful, soars at length sublime," 

as Scott phrases it in the Lord of the Isles ; but norie 
the less the prolonged doubtfulness is a dispiriting in- 
fluence. In his analysis of " the immediate emotions," 
Dr. Thomas Brown adverts to that weariness of mind 
which one would so gladly exchange for weariness of 
body, and which he takes to be perhaps more difficult to 
bear with good humour than many profound griefs, be- 
cause it involves the uneasiness of hope, that is renewed 
every moment, to be every moment disappointed. He 
supposes a day's journey along one continuous avenue, 
where the uniformity of similar trees at similar distances 
is of itself most wearisome ; but what we should feel 
with far more fretfulness would be the constant disap- 
pointment of our expectation, that the last tree which 
we beheld in the distance, would be the last that was to 
rise upon us ; when, " tree after tree, as if in mockery of 
our very patience itself, would still continue to present 
the same dismal continuity of line." Lord Bolingbroke, 
a professed expert in its power to weary and wear out, 
called suspense the only insupportable misfortune of life. 
A Latin adage declares such as feed on hope, to exist in 
suspense, not live : Qui spe aluntur, pendent, 11011 vivunt. 
What creature, exclaims Bosola, in Webster's Duchess of 



HEART SICKNESS OF HOPE DEFERRED. 125 

Malfi, " ever fed worse than hoping Tantalus ? nor ever 
died any man more fearfully than he that hoped for a 
pardon." Captain Marryat's weather-worn and time- 
tried Martin is fain to wish he dared hope as a sanguine 
younger hero can ; and the wish is followed by his 
author's compassionating comment : " Poor Martin ! he 
had long felt how bitter it was to meet disappointment 
after disappointment. How true it is, that hope deferred 
maketh the heart sick ! and his anticipations of early 
days, the buoyant calculations of youth, had been one 
by one crushed ; and now, having served his time [in the 
navy] nearly three times over, the reaction had become 
too painful, and as he truly said, he dared not hope."' 
Perhaps in all history there is not a more salient instance 
of hoping against hope, against hope deferred, than that 
of Columbus. Years and years were wasted in irksome 
solicitation ; pent, not indeed in the drowsy and 

monotonous attendance of antechambers, but, as his fore- 
most biographer narrates, amid scenes of peril and ad- 
ture, from his pursuit of which he was several times 
summoned to attend royal conferences, and anon dis- 
ced abruptly, re infectd. " Whenever the court had 
an interval of leisure and repose [from the exigencies of 
. war], there would again be manifested a dis- 
position to consider his proposal, but the hurry and 
in return, and the question be again 
■pt away.*' At intervals in the Life and . we 

ining upon intimations of the sovereigns' unwill- 
the door upon a project which might 
ductive of such important advantages; and then of 
their avowed want of means to engage in any new enter- 
pled with the hope, when the war should be 
time and means as well as inclination t<> 
mbus; — a starved reply to receive "aftei 
ma attendance, anx: md 



126 'HOPE DEFERRED 

deferred hope." He came to look upon these indefinite 
postponements as a mere courtly mode of evading his 
importunity; and after the rebuff in the summer of 1490, 
he is said to have renounced all further confidence in 
vague promises, which had so often led to chagrin ; and 
giving up all hopes of countenance from the throne, he 
turned his back upon Seville, indignant at the thoughts 
of having been beguiled out of so many years of waning 
existence. But it is impossible not to admire, with his 
biographer, the great constancy of purpose and loftiness 
of spirit displayed by Columbus, ever since he had con- 
ceived the sublime idea of his discovery. When he 
applied again to the court at the time of the surrender of 
Granada, in 1492, more than eighteen years had elapsed 
since the announcement of his design, the greatest part 
of which time had been consumed in applications to 
various sovereigns, — poverty, neglect, ridicule, contumely, 
and the heart sickness of hope deferred, all that hitherto 
had come of it. Five years later, when preparations 
were afoot for his third voyage, we read of him, that "so 
wearied and disheartened did he become by the impedi- 
ments thrown in his way," that he thought of abandoning 
his discoveries altogether. And the chapter in which 
Washington Irving relates the death of Columbus is in- 
troduced by a description of him " sinking under infirm- 
ity of body, heightened by that deferred hope which 
' maketh the heart sick.' A little more delay, a little 
more disappointment, . . . and this loyal and gener- 
ous heart would cease to beat." What Spenser had 
suffered at court the often cited lines from his Mother 
Hubbard's Tale too truly tell : — 

" Full little knowest thou that hast not tryd, 
What hell it is in suing long to byde ; 
To lose good days that might be better spent ; 
To waste long nights in pensive discontent ; 



MAKETH THE HEART SICK: 127 

To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow ; 
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow ; 
****** 

To have thy asking, yet wait many years . . . 
To eat thy heart with comfortless despairs." 

So again with Cortez lingering at the court from week 
to week, and from month to month, beguiled by the de- 
ceitful hopes of the litigant, and tasting, as Prescott says, 
all that bitterness of the soul which arises from hope 
deferred. " I know it by myself," professes Don John in 
Beaumont and Fletcher, " there can be no hell to his 
that hangs upon his hopes." If we count them happy 
that endure, happier in some sense is he that has not had 
to endure too long, but warrants the felicitations of the 
poet in such a case, — 

>t yet too late breaks on thy morn the sun ; 
Not yet deferred till Hope hath drooped too lone; 
To plume the pinion, and to pour the song : 
Hope— the sweet bird — while tJiat the air can fill, 
Let earth be ice, the soul has summer still !" 

There is a true ring of feeling that may be felt, in Tlic 
Appeal of George Beattie of Montrose : — 

iv, what is worse than black despair ? 
•hat sick hope too weak for flying, 
That plays at fast and loose with 1 
And wastes a weary life in dying, 

promise be a welcome guest, 
Yet it may be too late a comer; 

Hit a cuckoo voire at best— 
'I lie joy of spring, sea! ce la .ml in sunn 

is the feel in .Uie's own, his very own ? 

For how comes it that these two verses are word for 

word the first two of A Song by Hartley Coleridge, long 

published among tli..- singer's miscellaneous 

pocn 

A maiden in Southey's Madoc in Wales titters the 
plainl ry, with its home])-, telling similitude, — 



123 MARIANA AWEARY; VANESSA; MARY TUDOR. 

" Have I not nursed for two long wretched years 
That miserable hope, which every day 
Grows weaker like a baby sick to death, 
Yet dearer for its weakness day by day ? " 

Mariana in the moated grange, as pictured by a later 
poet, is an embodied type of the sickening languor of 
hope deferred. She only said, " The night is dreary, He 
cometh not," she said ; she said, " I am aweary, aweary, 
I would that I were dead ! " Most she loathed the hour 
when the thick-moted sunbeam lay athwart the cham- 
bers, and the day was sloping toward his western bower, 
— another day as good as gone, and no arrival of the 
absentee yet. Then said she, with sadder emphasis and 
bitterer accent than ever, " I am very dreary, He will not 
come," she said. Was this to be her end, to live for- 
gotten and die forlorn ? The Vanessa of Swift writes to 
him from Selbridge, in 1720, "Solitude is insupportable 
to a mind which is not easy. I have worn out my days 
in sighing, and my nights with watching, and thinking of 

, who thinks not of me. How many letters shall I 

send you before I receive an answer ? " To Miss Van- 
homrigh the Dean was present everywhere : his dear 
image was always before her eyes. But not Mariana 
pined more unavailingly for the absent Angelo, or was 
more heartsick with hope deferred. Mary Tudor yearn- 
ing for the return of Philip of Spain is another example 
to the purpose. Most reluctantly had she consented to 
his departure, in 1555, and he left her with a "faithful " 
though enforced promise of a speedy return ; but " the 
weeks went, and he did not come, and no longer spoke 
of coming." When he summoned to him such of his 
Spanish suite as he had left behind, — a too sure token of 
his intentions as to a return, — the queen " wept and re- 
monstrated ; more piteous lamentations were never heard 
from woman." In the words of Francois de Noailles, 



WORDSWORTH'S WEARY MARGARETS. 129 

cited by Mr. Froude, she felt old age stealing so fast 
upon her, that she could not endure thus to lose what 
she had bought so dearly. Next year, when Paget re- 
turned from Flanders with a letter instead of Philip, 
u the poor queen looked ten years older on the receipt of 
: As .ith the weary waiting lady in Wordsworth, — 

Month falls on month with heavier weight; 
Day sickens round her, and the night 
Is empty of repo;. 

iana has a closer parallel in the Rydal bard's 
Margaret, the " Forsaken," who only prays to know the 
5t, and wishes as if her heart would burst : — 

.nt years 

Tell seemingly no doubtful tale ; 
And yet they leave it short, and fears 

And hopes are strong and will prevaiL 
My calmest faith escapes not pain ; 
And, feeling that the hope is vain, 
I think that he will come ag ai 

The Margaret of the Ex masterly study — 

found sad and drooping by the narrator of her piteous 
ter an interval of many months, for she had 
J no tidings of her husband ; if he li knew 

not that he lived ; if he were d knew not he was 

She might seem the same in person and appear- 
but now her hou- py hand of negli- 
gence ; her garden fleeted and defaced by w 
and above all, 

'• her infant babe 

I from his mother caught the trick of ^r 
d sighed among his 

d in unquiet wit! 

it have been a sore 
Ofttimcs she would sit alone for half the 
>encath the porch, — 

K 



1 30 A WAITING AND A WEAR Y. 

" And if a dog passed by, she still would, quit 
The shade, and look abroad. On this old bench 
For hours she sate ; and evermore her eye 
Was busy in the distance, shaping things 
That made her heart beat quick." 

Meanwhile her poor hut sank to decay, and so she 
lived through the long winter, reckless and alone .; until 
her house by frost, and thaw, and rain, was sapped ; yet 
still she loved the wretched spot, nor would for worlds 
have parted from it ; 

" and still that length of road, 

And this rude bench, one torturing hope endeared, 
Fast rooted at her heart ; and here . . . 
In sickness she remained ; and here she died, 
Last human tenant of these ruined walls." 

Crabbe's Ellen, in the Tales of the Hall, to whom, s< 
long expectant, " no Cecil came," is another of the book- 
noted sufferers from hope deferred : — 

" With suffering mind the maid her prospects viewed, 
That hourly varied with the varying mood; 
As passed the day, the week, the month, the year, 
The faint hope sickened, and gave place to fear. 
— No Cecil came." 

Lucilla, in Godolphin, is described holding an unqui< 
commune with her own passionate heart, by the border 
of the lake whose silver quiet mocked the mind it hac 
in happier moments, reflected. She had dragged on the 
weary load of time throughout the winter, waiting an< 
still waiting for a sign from the absentee ; and now tl 
early and soft spring was already abroad — a season that 
hitherto had " possessed a mysterious and earnest attrac- 
tion for Lucilla," but now, all its voices were mute. 
Hope deferred had blighted her capacity for enjoyment, 
and now a tearful and spiritless dejection was her normal 
lot. " Day after day passed — no letter, or worse than 
none, and at length Lucilla became utterly impatient of 



HEART SICKNESS OF HOPE DEFERRED. 131 

all rest ; a nervous fever possessed her ; the extreme 
solitude of the place filled her with that ineffable sensa- 
tion of irritability which sometimes preludes the madness 
that has been produced in criminals by solitary confine- 
ment.'' Another Eminent Hand in the art and practice 
of fiction contrasts the position of a man who can go 
out into the world, and cut his way through the forest of 
difficulty, with that of a woman who finds herself in the 
midst of that dismal forest, and who can only sit at the 
door of her lonesome hut, looking out with weary eyes 
for the prince who is to come and rescue her ; and we 
are put in remembrance of the many women there are to 
whom the prince never comes, and who must needs die 
and be buried beneath that gloomy umbrage. Another 
draws the picture of a modern Mariana, changed from 
the bright, elastic, impetuous young beauty to a pale 
languid girl, with " weary of the world " painted on every 
part of her eloquent body ; her right hand dangling by 
her side, a piece of work on the ground, that has escaped 
from those listless fingers, her left arm stretched at full 
length on the table with an unspeakable abandon, and 
her brow laid wearily on it above the elbow. " So lies 

ounded bird, so droops the broken lily." Another 

in a chapter headed "Watching and Waiting/' 

a watchful waiter all aweary, gazing down the green 

before the house as the shadows deepen night after 

; and night after night the long summer twilight 

nd the dews grow chill, and a dull soreness 

gathers and spreads about her heart, and what she locks 

:nes not. Or we might glance at the pining Mari- 
riana's near namesake, of Miss Austen's Sense 

Sensibility — busy observing the direction of the wind, 
watching the variations of the sky, and imaginir. 
alteration in the air, all to speed her fancies touchii: 

of deferred hope, and the remedy ; or at Rachel 



132 HEART-SICK WITH HOPE DEFERRED. 

Ray, never owning herself ill, but gradually becoming 
thin and wan and haggard, as time passes, and with con- 
stant disappointment she constantly watches for the 
postman ; or at Margaret Hall, looking wearily from be- 
hind the blind of the upper window in Cecil Street, till 
the city clocks chime midnight, and the aching heaviness 
of her eyes and brain makes her hope that forgetfulness 
is near at hand, though it is not ; or at Eleanor Vane, 
sickening with fruitless watching for her father's return, 
and thinking the quarters struck by the clocks in 
the distance of interminable length, though each longer 
than the last : the rattling of wheels on the boulevard 
is at an end ; daylight dawns — grey, cold morning, chill 
and dismal after the oppressive August night, and she 
stands now at the window, watching the empty street ; 
and as the day grows older and brighter, the anxious 
face of the pale watcher only grows paler and more 
anxious. Spenser's lines may apply to the Mariana 
type — 

" And then, her griefe with errour to beguyle, 
She fayn'd to count the time againe anew, 
As if before she had not counted trew : 
For houres, but dayes ; for weekes that passed were, 
She told but moneths to make them seeme more few : 
Yet, when she reckned them still drawing neare, 
Each hour did seeme a moneth, and every moneth a yeare." 

And so, in their way, yet here a little and there a little 
out of their way, may those in The New Timoji, de- 
scriptive of a case — 

" Where the heart, sick, despondent, tired with all, 
Looks joyless round and sees the dungeon wall ; — 
Where even God is silent, and the curse 
Of stagnor settles on the universe ; — 
When prayer is powerless, and one sense of dearth 
Abysses all, save solitude, on earth. 
So sate the bride : the drooping form, the eye 
Vacant, yet fixed — that air which Misery, 



BLESSIXGS THAT COME TOO LATE. 133 

The heart's Medusa, hardens into stone, 
Sculptured the Death which dwelleth in the lone." 



Grant that the fulfilment of a long-deferred hope is 
often as a tree of life, with leaves for the healing of the 
long heart-sickness ; yet, if too long deferred, the fruit is 
apt to be as apples of Sodom, Dead Sea fruit, dust and 
ashes in the mouth. All too true is the saying that 
there are so many blessings in this life that come too 
late ; many a vessel laden with the gold of Ophir nears 
the shore only when her owner lies dead upon the sands, 
or his heart is dead to the joys of the ship come home 
at last. When the artist, William Crawford, in the story, 
tasted the first-fruits of success, the wife, to have pur- 
chased whose happiness he would have sold his heart's 
blood, had been dead ten years. She had felt the cruel 
hand of poverty, and had withered under its bitter gripe, 
but had never complained, — bearing all meekly for her 
husband's sake. .And now, when people offered him 

prices for his pictures, he felt half inclined to refuse 
their commissions in utter sickness of heart. "You 

■1 have bought my ' Pyramus and Thisbe ' twelve 
.' he would have cried. "A fifty-pound cheque 

I have done that for me then which all the kings 
and princes of the earth could not do now. It would 
have brought .1 smile to the face of my wife." So with 
the Panslavisco of a popular essayist Panslavisco had 
as much genius, and played as learnedly, sweetly, grace- 
full}', boldly, nervously, wildly, as he does now, uv .uv 
told ; but he played in a garret, where he had no friends, 
. no linen, no bread, and where his landlady bullied 

him for his rent. " V;: • [uabbling OVera disputed 

right in a wash-tub in a ba< k-slum have heard as : 
Dating harmonies through a garret-window held up by a 
bundle of firewood, as princesses of the blood hear now 



134 HOPE DEFERRED TOO LONG 

in the Nineveh Rooms." Now, the tide of prosperity 
has set in for the musician : fortune, fame, sycophants to 
admire, beautiful women to smile, lords to say, " Come 
and dine." But they are all too late. They cannot bring 
back the young wife, dead in a long slow agony ; the 
little children who faded one by one ; they cannot 
" bring back the time when the man had a heart to love 
and hope, and was twenty-one years of age." Or glance, 
again, at Sir Arthur Helps's hero prince of the Lake 
City, Realmah, when he came to reign in the hearts of 
all his fellow-citizens as the man of their election. 
" Many a subdued and furtive sigh came from Realmah's 
heart, when he reflected that the one person whose de- 
light in his success he would have cared for most, was 
numbered with the dead." The poet at his wife's grave 
thus gives vent to the thoughts within him : — 

" Oh, how I longed to set you like a queen, 
Above all sorrows in some happy place : 
To crown you with my triumphs, and efface 
The memory of such cares as came between 
Our most dear love. I could not stay your tears 
When critics blamed, or publishers said ' Nay ; ' 
Although I called myself more wise than they, 
And prophesied a harvest with the years. 
And now I stand among my sheaves alone, 
My golden sheaves ; that only make me weep 
To think I cannot wake you from your sleep." 

Very effectively done is Mr. Charles Reade's portrait- 
ure of the French Commandant Raynal, who has risen 
from the ranks, and counted on delighting his old mother, 
the grocer's widow, with his rank and with his savings, 
but gets a letter to tell him of her death the very day he 
is made commandant — a terrible blow to the simple 
rugged soldier, who had never much time or inclination 
" to flirt with a lot of girls, and touches his heart." So 
he came to Paris honoured and rich, but downcast. Here 



AND FULFILLED TOO LATE. 135 

had he been scraping all this dross together, and he 
would give it all to sit one hour by the fire, with her 
hand in his, and hear her say she had lived to be proud 
of him. " The day this epaulette was put on my 
shoulder in Italy, she died in Paris. Ah, how could you 
have the heart to do that, my old woman ? " A rough 
way of putting the question, but with undoubted heart 
on the questioner's side ; heart's appeal to heart ; loving 
son's to lost mother's. 

When the late Mr. Justice Maule, as a rising barrister, 
with briefs and fees coming in, returned from circuit to 
find his mother on her death-bed, the shock, we are told, 
1 severe one, for a keen sensibility was veiled under 
his blunt and independent manners, and he had always 
been devoted to his mother, the desire of pleasing whom 
had been his strongest motive for exertion ; and it has 
been plausibly suggested that the kind of moody in- 
difference and somewhat cynical disregard of conven- 
tionalities which he afterwards displayed maybe in some 
measure attributed to the effect of this loss. 

Southey's pathetic lines are not now quoted by the 
present writer for the first time : * 

" Such consummation of my work will now 
Be but a mournful close, the One being gone 
Whom to have satisfied was still to me 
A pure reward, outweighing far all breath 

( H public praise." 



* In the second volume of Recreations of a Recluse, pp. 308-320, 
found a variety of illustrations and parallel passages bear- 
ing on this theme. 



XIII. 
THE HEARTS OWN SECRET OF BITTERNESS. 

Proverbs xiv. 10. 

THE heart knoweth his own bitterness ; and a 
stranger no more compasseth it than he inter- 
meddleth with his joy. Of Him to whom we consecrate 
the words, " Never sorrow was like His sorrow," the pro- 
verb holds good with an emphasis all its own. As the 
poet of the Christian Year sings of His tears over 
doomed Jerusalem, — 

" But hero ne'er or saint 

The secret load might know, 
With which His spirit waxeth faint ; 
His is a Saviour's woe." 

But of every man in his degree the proverb holds good, 
at some point or other of his history, if not at very many 
points, and day by day continually. 

" The world's a room of sickness, where each heart 
Knows its own anguish and unrest." 

Every one, in the words of King Solomon's Temple 
dedication service, every one knows his own sore and his 
own grief. The tongue touches where the tooth aches, 
but the best dentist cannot guess at the truth unless one 
opens one's mouth, Riccabocca sententiously sayeth. 
We can detect, quoth Harley L'Estrange, when some- 
thing is on the mind-^some care, some fear, some 
trouble ; but when the heart closes over its own more 
passionate sorrow, who can discover, who conjecture ? 
It is true, observes a philosophic essayist, that we have 
all much in common ; but what we have most in com- 
mon is this — that we are all isolated. Man is more 
than a combination of passions common to his kind. 



THE HEARTS OWN BITTER SECRET 137 

ond them and behind them, an inner life, whose 
current we think we know within us, flows on in solitary 
stillness." Friendship itself is declared to have nothing 
in common with this dark sensibility, so repellent and 
so forbidding — much less may a stranger penetrate to 
those untrodden shores. We may apply Wordsworth's 

lines, 

•• To friendship let him turn 

For succour ; but perhaps he sits alone 

On stormy waters, tossed in a little boat 

That holds but him, and can contain no more." 

Chateaubriand expatiates in his memoirs on the bitter- 

of a private grief which the multitude cannot 

understand, and which is therefore all the more keenly 

felt: "Contrasting it with other ills does not blunt the 

edge of the affliction. One can never be the judge of 

another's grief. . . . The hearts of men have divers 

secrets which are incomprehensible to other hearts." 

His practical application is, that we are not to dispute 

with others about the reality of their sufferings ; it is 

with sorrows as with countries — each man has his own. 

_,lish divine remarks, in a passage which 

be worth quoting, for the sake of its now 

obsolete use of the word mcthodisi^ — "All of us have 

some or other tender part of our souls which we cannot 

>uld be ungently touched ; every one must be 

• to find them out."* The term now 

r exclusively applied to, the folli 

Of Wesley, once indicated those who were methodical in 

tin method in their phi- 
md their practical ethics. 

I, Mr. I),iilas affirms, than that 
• • its own bitterness, ti. 

u no n r penned." We see 

Jackson, Justifying Faith, b. iv. c. 5. 



138 THE HEARTS OWN WELL-KEPT SECRET 

each other glad or sad, he observes, but we do not 
understand the sources of each other's joy and misery ; 
often we do not understand the sources of our own. 
Let any one study his own heart, says Professor H. 
Reed, and he will know that there are passions, whose 
very might and depth give them a sanctity which we 
instinctively recognize by veiling them from the gaze of 
others. " They are the sacred things of the temple of 
the human soul, and the common touch would only pro- 
fane them." In childhood, indeed, tears are shed with- 
out restraint or disguise ; but when the self-conscious- 
ness of manhood, as the professor puts it, has taught us 
that tears are the expression of those passions which are 
too sacred for exposure, " the heart will often in silence 
break rather than violate this admirable instinct of our 
nature." It knoweth its own bitterness, and to inter- 
meddling of any stranger, however well-intentioned, its 
style is Noli me tangere. The suffering spirit cannot 
descend from its dignity of reticence, Mr. Trollope 
somewhere says ; a consciousness in particular of un- 
deserved woe produces a grandeur of its own, with 
which the high-souled sufferer will not easily part. 
Madame de Stael rules that Nid a le droit de contester a 
un autre sa douleur. There is much implied in that 
short sentence, writes Mrs. Richard Trench, who quotes 
it in support of her expression of impatience at hearing 
any one too decisive on what may or may not deeply 
wound the bosom of another. * 

° See a letter of hers to Mrs. Leadbeater (Remains, p. 284) on a 
mother's incommunicable grief in " losing her little blossom." The 
letters of Frederick Perthes iterate the proverb in regard of family 
bereavement. " Each father's and mother's heart knows its own 
bitterness, and no third person can enter into it." This he says in 
declining to gratify a friend's curiosity about the loss itself, and the 
character of the departed (his son Rudolph). On another occa- 
sion, and with another kind of reference, he writes : " No one 



OF INCOMMUNICABLE GRIEF. 139 

Grief for the dead has been said to take its most 
touching and attractive form when it chastens and 
refines a whole life, rather than when its poignancy 
disables the mourner from everyday duties ; the reason 
of this being, that with acute and overwhelming afflic- 
tions there is no real, at least no adequate, sympathy. 
■ The widow and the childless have sorrows into which 
none can enter, and, therefore, with which none can, in 
the truest sense, fully sympathize. It is as in death — 
we die and grieve alone." As there is no companion- 
ship in the grave, so is there none in that stage of 
bereavement where the whole world is as a tomb. 
"There seems to be something superhuman — some- 
thing, at any rate, out of the range of ordinary sym- 
pathy — in the very aspect of a chilling and desolating 
paralysing the mourner and the spectator too. 
It is justly observed, however, that not only are we not 
attracted, but we are apt to be almost repelled, by wit- 
nessing in our social relationships a spectacle of prolonged 
and agonizing sorrow : — because we cannot enter into it, 
- tempted to stand aloof, if not to censure. " It is 
above us, and we cannot sympathize but with kindred 
natures. We almost judge it harshly, and call it selfish 
and overstrained. And herein we are generally wrong; 
we only misread the sentiment because we cannot under- 
I it." In the pettiest character, says Canon Kings- 
ley, there are unfathomable-' depths, which the poet, ail- 
though he may pretend to be, can never analyse, 
but at ly dimly guess at. There are feelings which 

'heir silent agony, writes the author of \"u>Lt, for 

fa ' a poor human heart feels, when such echoes of a 

vorld would pierce his soul. The joy of meetin 
: rief ; the joy I shared wit!. nd kept tl. 

that in this case he exemplified only one of the 
s of Solomon'b 



Ho THE HEARTS OWN WELL-KEPT SECRET 

they are among those which are never told ; or if they 
are, who can imagine the mental suffering that has been 
endured, from the mere force of the words in which 
those sufferings are told, — words that seem trifling in 
the ears of even an interested listener ? " All of us 
perhaps have these sensations, but not one of us can 
enter into them when they are another's. Of this truth 
we have an innate consciousness, and from this cause 
the minutiae of any individual's unhappiness remain 
untold even to his most intimate friend." The strongest 
heart, says George Eliot, will faint sometimes under the 
feeling that friends only know half its sorrows. As in 
the case of Mr. Tryan, while we are coldly discussing a 
man's career, sneering at his mistakes, blaming his rash- 
ness, and labelling his opinions " evangelical and nar- 
row," or " latitudinarian and pantheistic," or "Anglican 
and superstitious," — that man, in his solitude, is perhaps 
shedding hot tears because his sacrifice is a hard one, 
because strength and patience are failing him to speak 
the difficult word and do the difficult deed. Charlotte 
Bronte, describing in a letter the pains a kindly and 
eminent physician took to understand her ailments and 
relieve her depression, adds : " but none — not the most 
skilful physician — can get at more than the outside of 
these things ; the heart knows its own bitterness, and 
the frame its own poverty, and the mind its own strug- 
gles." For there are sorrows, where of necessity the 
soul must be its own support, says Wallenstein in 
Schiller. The Alonzo of Congreve's Mourning Bride 
declares it to be 

" a wretch's comfort still to have 

Some small reserve of near and inward woe, 
Some unsuspected hoard of darling grief, 
Which they unseen may wail, and weep, and mourn, 
And, glutton-like, devour alone." 



OF INCOMMUNICABLE GRIEF. 141 

Vet, if we may believe Mrs. Riddell, there is nothing 
which offends human nature so much as the loneliness 
of a fellow-creature ; for although we lock our own 
doors, dry our own tears, smile our forced smiles, and 
talk our lightest words, when our fellows come near to 
probe the wounds we would cover away from sight, we 
are still angry and offended because they will not tell us 
of their ailments, because the cry of mortality in its 
bitterest anguish is ever, " Leave me with my God " — 
its most earnest prayer to its eager associates, that to be 
left alone — alone. Edward Quillinan in the English 
burial-ground at Oporto wears on his lip a smile, and 
teaches his voice a careless tone, and affects to sip 
lightly his cup of woe, " nor let its harsh contents be 
known ;" for he will not droop to worldly eyes, as if his 
grief besought their pit)-, but breathes his lonely sighs 
within that solemn field of graves. 

" For mine are woes that dwell apart, 
And human sympathy reject; 
Too sacred to the jealous heart 

To seek compassion's cold respect." 

Chacun sent son tourment et salt ce qiiil endure, is one of 

a few extant lines by which La Boetie bring dead yet 

. »r be forgotten Shelley's Prince Athanase, 

his friends babbled vain words and fond philo- 

hy : 

'• How it galled and bit 

ry mind, this converse vain and cold; 
. like an eyeless nightmare, grief did sit 
his being ; a snake which fold by fold 
it the- life of life; a clinging fiend 

• d him if he .stirred with deadlier hold ; — 
And so his grief remained— let it remain — untold.'' 



XIV. 

A DINNER OF HERBS AND GOOD FELLOW- 
SHIP. 

Proverbs xv. 17. 

THE Wise Man's maxim, in one chapter of Proverbs, 
that better is a simple dinner of herbs where love 
is, than a stalled ox and hatred withal, has its parallel 
passage in another, which declares that better is a dry 
morsel, and quietness therewith, than a house full of 
sacrifices, with strife. The meanest fare, as Bishop 
Patrick paraphrases the former text, if associated with 
the love of him who provides it, and with agreement 
and good feeling on the part of the guests, is " much 
better than the most sumptuous entertainments of him 
that hates us, or among those that quarrel." A man 
prone to wrath, the old expositor goes on to explain) will 
easily disturb the most peaceable company, being apt to 
quarrel for very trifles ; and that is bad for the digestion 
of all concerned. In Miss Austen's unfinished story 
of The Watsons, as the quietly sociable little meal of 
two of the sisters of that name concluded, the elder 
could not help observing how comfortably it had passed. 
" It is delightful to me," she said, " to have things going 
on in peace and good humour. Nobody can tell how 
much I hate quarrelling. Now, though we have had 
nothing but fried beef, how good it has all seemed." Dr. 
Thomas Brown expatiates, after his expansive manner, 
in one of his metaphysical lectures, on the necessity the 
most sensual feel, of collecting smiles around the table, 
to give a taste to their costly food, even though there be 
at the heart a sad conviction that the smiles are only the 
mimicry of good-will and kindliness. But so essential, 



A DIXXER OF HERBS. 



our philosopher insists, is kindliness to happiness, that 
even this very mimicry of it is more than can be aban- 
doned ; and he affirms that if all the gay faces of the 
guests around the festive board could, in an instant, be 
converted into statues, in that very instant the delight of 
him who spread the magnificence for the eyes of others, 
and caught a sort of shadowy gaiety from that cheerful- 
ness, which had at least the appearance of social regard, 
would cease ; and if any enjoyment at all were received, 
it would at the best be far less than that of the "labourer, 
in his coarser meal, when there is only simple fare upon 
the board, but affection in every heart that is round it, 
and social gladness in every eye." Spenser's Hermit 
entertains Prince Arthur and his friends on very plain 
fare, but in excellent taste and hearty good-will — 

I with such forged shows as fitter beene 
For courting fooles that courtesies would faine, 
But with entire affection and appearance plaine. 
" Yet was their fare but homely, such as hee 
Did use his feeble body to sustaine ; 
The which full gladly they did take in glee, 
Such as it was, ne did of want complaine." 

Daniel and his three companions in captivity feeding 

on pulse, and thriving on it, are an exemplary comment, 
in their way, on the proverbial dinner of herbs. Nebu- 
chadnezzar, king of Babylon, appointed them a daily 
of his own royal meat, and of the wine which 
he drank. But Daniel purposed in his heart that he 
would not defile himself with this dainty fare ; and he 
and the Three Children, as they are called, asked instead 
for p A, and water to drink. B< fcter to them was 

a dinner of herbs, even day by day continually; and 

r for them, as the event seemed to prove, for their 
COUnl d fairer and latter in llesh than all 

hildren whi< h did eat the portion of the king's 



144 DANIELS DIET OF PULSE. 

" Meats by the law unclean, or offered first 
To idols, those young Daniel could refuse." 

So Milton's Tempter in the wilderness admits, in the 
course of his temptation of One who, at the close of his 
wilderness fasting of forty days' duration, is said to have 
dreamed, as appetite is wont to dream, of meats and 
drinks, nature's refreshment sweet, so that sometimes 
beside the brook of Cherith He stood with Elijah, and 
shared with him the food brought by the ravens with 
their horny beaks, — 

" Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse." 

Extravagant enough is the supposition the same poet 
imputes to Comus, " If all the world should in a pet of 
temperance feed on pulse." Pettishness of any kind or 
degree would spoil outright the flavour of pulse, and in- 
deed cancel its raison d'etre, in so far as the dinner of 
herbs without strife has the proverbial preference ; pulse 
in a pet were not better, perhaps, merely as pulse, and in 
spite of the pet. 

Sir Thomas Browne discourseth eruditely on Daniel's 
declining "pagan commensation," and on his strictly mak- 
ing choice of leguminous food, the "gross diet of pulse ;" 
thus making choice, our Christian physician contends, of 
" no improper diet to keep himself fair and plump," such 
is the nutritive and " impinguating faculty in pulses." 
And so was he " by this kind of diet sufficiently main- 
tained in a fair and carnous state of body ; and, accord- 
ingly, his picture not improperly drawn, that is, not 
meagre and lean," like Jeremy's, but plump and fair, 
answering to the most authentic draught of the Vatican, 
and the late German Luther's Bible." Old Cotta, in 
Pope, abuses the scriptural example to some purpose, 
economically speaking : 

" What though, the use of barbarous spits forgot, 
His kitchen vied in coolness with his grot ; 



NEBUCHADNEZZAR GRAZIN 145 

His court with nettles, moats with cresses stored, 
With soups unbought and salads bless'd his board ? 
If Cotta lived on pulse, it was no more 
Than Brahmins, saints, and sages did before." 

That the children of the captivity, with palace fare at 
command, should think a dinner of herbs better, — that 
with sumptuous viands prepared for them, they should 
prefer pulse, — may well have "astonied " Nebuchadnez- 

the king. Yet was he one day to go lower than pulse. 

•A\ from contemplating with vainglorious exultation 
it Babylon he had built by the might of his 
power, and for the honour of his majesty, was he not 
driven from men, to have his dwelling with the beasts 
of the field, and to eat grass as oxen ? As Chaucer 
points the moral and adorns the tale, — 

"This king of kinges preu was and elate ; 
But sodeynly he left his dignite, 
I-lik a best him semed for to be, 
And eet hay as an 1 

Spenser unmindful of him in the same attitude : 

;ere was that great proud king of liabylon, 
That would com pel I all nations to adore 

I him as onely God to call upon ; 
Till thro' celestial doome thrown out of dore, 
In" he was transformed 

>ley\s Hercward the Wake may 

t the crazed prince of Alboronia, between ( 

n, upon whom Dirk 

mmerhand, the richest man in Walchcrei . one 

he watches the herd of horses in the fen : 

:i man, clothed in . whinnying 

ictly like a i and then to 

nc. Dirk advances with his st iff, medi- 

can strike, the " man or hors 

mbruted in 
p with its hind legs in hi md 

L 



146 NEBUCHADNEZZAR'S STRANGE MALADY. 

then springing on to the said hind legs runs away with 
extraordinary swiftness some fifty yards ; and then goes 
down on all fours and begins grazing again. 

" The Syrian king to beasts was headlong thrown, 
Ere to himself he could be mortal known," 

is Waller's memento * of Nebuchadnezzar out at grass. 
The great St. Ephrem composed a panegyric on those 
fioo-fcoi, or grazing monks, of whom Gibbon makes 
mention, as of a numerous sect of Anachorets who derived 
their name from their humble practice of grazing in the 
fields of Mesopotamia with the common herd. The 
history of Nebuchadnezzar was eagerly alleged in sup- 
port of the possibility of lycanthropy, by believers in 
that transformation of witches into wolves. Professor 
Rawlinson, by the way, accounts for the apparent silence 
kept by Berosus and Abydenus on the subject of the. 
king's mysterious malady, by suggesting that the native 
writers could not be expected to tarnish their country's 
greatest monarch by any mention of an affliction which 
was of so strange and debasing a character. Indeed he 
may not have been aware of it, the professor contends ; 
for, as' Nebuchadnezzar outlived his affliction, and was 
again " established in his kingdom," all monuments be- 
longing to the time of his malady would have been 
subject to his own revision ; and if any record of it was 
allowed to descend to posterity, care would have been 
taken that the truth was not made too plain, by couching 
the record, as the Bampton Lecturer surmises, in suffi- 
ciently ambiguous phraseology. One passage f in what 

* Beranger gives full play to his irreverence when he chante tin 
roi devenu bceuf, in the person of Nabuchodonosor (182 1). 

t When the monarch relates that during some considerable time 
— four years apparently — all his great works were at a stand : "he 
did not build high places ; he did not lay up treasures ; he did no 
sing the praises of his Lord, Merodach ; he did not offer him sacri 



ot 



HI 'MA X EA TERS OF GRA SS. 147 

is known as the " Standard Inscription " is supposed to 
contain the royal version of that remarkable story with 
which Daniel ends his notice of the great Chaldaean 
king. 

The learned and virtuous Abarbanel, a Jewish author- 
ity of the highest rank, has left on record in his account 
of the sufferings of his countrymen and contemporaries 
who were expelled from Spain, this piteous circumstance 
in the story of their migration to the neighbourhood of 
Fez, which town they were forbidden to enter, lest they 
might cause a famine there : they had to encamp on the 
sand)' plain, and were fain to live on the scanty grass of 
the held, "happy," says Abarbanel, "if the grass had 
been plentiful ; " yet, even in this state, religiously avoid- 
ing the violation of their Sabbath by plucking the grass 
with their hands, but grovelling (like the great king of 
Babylon) on their knees, and cropping it with their teeth. 
n's spectre crew, in their dread experiences and 
extreme privations among the rocks of Tierra del Fuego, 
were fain to eat grass for awhile. 

The royal Chaldaean's malady has been made matter 
for mirth by many who have either disbelieved the story 
'it, or have thought any calamity fair game for 
levity and badinage. Under a supposed exigency of 
dinner conversation a rather " horsey " gentleman is said 
to have plied Bishop Blomfield with the question, " How 
|ong he really thought it would take to I Nebuchad- 
nezzar int 1 lair condition after bringing him up from 
! \\ a stanza beginning, — 

fice ; he <lul not keep up the works of irrigation/' The ca 

. religious worship and of works of utility, 
I in the document in phrases of such obscurity as to be un- 
ible. H Rawlinson 1 tion that, until a 

may be pi arded 

1 Daniel's plainer narrative. See his Bampton 
Lcct 59. 



NEBUCHADNEZZAR GRAZING. 



" Babel was Nimrod's hunting seat, and then 
A town of gardens, walls, and wealth amazing, 
Where Nebuchadonosor, king of men, 
Reign'd, till one summer's day he took to grazing." 

Father Prout has a lyric, in one of the Watergrass 
Carousals, about "King Nebuchadnezzar, who was turned 
for his sins to a grazier." And so on with others. For 
it is not even every clerical poet or poetaster who is 
serious enough to moralize his strain on such a subject, 
after the manner of Young, when that avowedly Com- 
plaining bard, heavy with night thoughts, exclaims, 

" What though our passions are run mad, and stoop 
Like the proud Eastern, struck by Providence, 
With low, terrestrial appetite, to graze 
On trash, on toys, dethroned from high desire ! " 

But let us so far revert to the topic of a dinner of 
herbs and good fellowship, as to make it the starting- 
point for an excursus on the merits of plain living when 
co-existent with high thinking, be that high thinking due 
to genial companionship with high thinkers, simple and 
unexacting in their tastes at table, or to aids less compre- 
hensively social, even to a faculty purely individual. 

Fresh from a tour on the Continent in 1802, Words- 
worth could not, by his own account, on his return to 
London, but be struck with the vanity and parade of our 
own country, especially in great towns and cities, as con- 
trasted with the aspect of things abroad. Hence his 
Sonnet, written in September of that year, expressing a 
profound regret to think ' that now our life is only drest 
for show ; mean handywork of craftsman, cook, or 
groom : * 

" We must run glittering like a brook 
In the open sunshine, or we are unblest : 
The wealthiest man among us is the best : 
No grandeur now in nature or in book 






PLAIN LIVING AXD HIGH THINKING. 149 

Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense, 
This is idolatry ; and these we adore : 
Plain living and high thinking are no more." 

Five years after that was written, the most fervent and 
keenly appreciative of Wordsworth's admirers visited him 
for the first time, at that little cottage by Grasmere which 
s afterwards, for long and happy years, to become the 
tor's own abode. He found the poet's sister making 
breakfast in the tiny sitting-room. " No urn was there ; 
no glittering breakfast service ; a kettle boiled upon the 
fire, and everything was in harmony with these unpretend- 
arrangements." The visitor assures us he had seldom 
seen so humble a menage ; and contrasting the dignity 
of the man with this honourable poverty, and this coura- 
geous avowal of it, the utter absence of all effort to 
, the simple truth of the case, he felt his admira- 
increased. " This/' thought I to myself, " is, indeed, 
in his own words, 'plain living and high thinking.'' This 
ndeed, to reserve the humility and the parsimonies of 
life for its bodily enjoyments, and to apply its lavishness 
and its luxury to its enjoyments of the intellect/' So, he 
.lit, might Milton have lived ; so Marvel. 
Philosophy, by Shenstone's computation, 

u requires 

i cost; to crown its utmost prayer 
Suffice the root-built cell, the- simple il 
The juicy viand, and the crystal stream.'' 

poetry — sometimes pseudo-pastoral, <>r singing 
tto — abounds in sentiments like that of the Shep- 
herd' in Heywood : 

''Those that delight in dainties' store, 
Stomach feeds at oner, no more ; 
I when with homely fare we I 

With us it doth as well 

And many turn-, we belter B] 

1 or our wild fruits no surfeits breed." 



i.5o A DINNER OF HERBS WHERE LOVE IS. 

Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, the pious and accomplished 
authoress of Select Memoirs of Port Royal, relates 
with complacency her cherished preference, as a child, 
of brown bread and honey suppers with old Mrs. 
Matthews, in the study, to costlier treats in less " studi- 
ous " surroundings. " One day Lady Scott laughed at 
me for going to what she thought so poor a treat. She 
told me, if I would visit her at Boulogne I should have 
a very different supper. She then enumerated a great 
number of nice and splendid things she thought I should 
like ; after which she asked me if I would rather sup 
with old Mrs. Matthews on brown bread, or with her on 
these dainties. I stopped a moment, because I felt it 
was kind of her to ask me, and then I replied, * With Mrs. 
Matthews/ She asked, ' Why ? ' I answered, proudly, 
* Because I had rather sup with Fabricius than Lucullus.' " 

Among other things for which Burns invokes a bless- 
ing on the memory of his father — by all accounts a most 
worthy and exemplary man — is this : that he impressed 
on his children " the sentiment, that nothing was more 
unworthy in the character of a man, than that his happi- 
ness should in the least depend on what he should eat 
and drink." To have seen the venerable Bishop Skinner 
at his cottage-parsonage, a biographer of Burns deside- 
rates for that poet, on the ground that it would have 
been a lesson of religious contentment that could 
scarcely have failed to touch and improve his spirit. He 
would, it seems, have found the old prelate living in 
what was literally a cottage — what is called in Scotland 
a but and a ben — with earthen floors and grateless 
fireplaces, not enjoying an income equal to. that of a 
foreman in a common workshop, yet cheerful, and even 
mirthful, and the centre of a family circle accomplished 
and refined. One of the Ayrshire bard's correspondents 
thus writes to him concerning another exemplar to the 



PLAIX LIVIXG AXD HIGH THIXKIXG. 151 



purpose : " Well, what do you think of good Lady 
Clackmannan ? Her house is a specimen of the man- 
sions of our gentry of the last age, when hospitality and 
elevation of mind were conspicuous amidst plain fare and 
plain furniture." The sentence reads like an expanded 
paraphrase of Wordsworth's pithy plain living and high 
thin;: 

Of William Hunter it is on record, that when he in- 
vited his younger friends to his table they were seldom 
I with more than two dishes ; when alone, he 
rarely sat down to more than one : he would say, " A 
nvui who cannot dine on this deserves no dinner." 
Quite after his ideal of the Happy Man would be that 
ryed in contemporary verse, as one in whose house- 
reign peace, order, comfort, and who seeks no more 
than these ; whose 

u mansion, furnished in no costly style, 

Oft makes his tasty neighbours stare and smile ; 
But that unmoved and unavenged he b 
Unless it be, sometimes to stare at theirs ;" 

nvies not, nor thinks of purchasing, their costly 
and tables and draperies, carpets, vases, mirrors, — 

"Cupids that wave their waxen flames in air, 
Sideboards of plate, . ami china ware — 

1 oh. surprising phi 
tes not a wish or thought for one of them. 
Still more surprising, that his house and bo. ml 

: ir than he could well afford. 
No I dainties on his tables steal ; 

. though ample, is the daily meaL 
The bairns around in graceful order sit ; 

y hands implore the SavOUl") In: ; 

I 

tor more thin : 
imp nd body and a vigorous mind 

:-., that cannot be combii 

And aii;. the mental strings to br.t 

a hard}-, independent ra 



1 5 2 RELISH FOR HO MEL Y FARE. 

There are some who think it good policy to assume 
this virtue, if they have it not. Perhaps, out of sheer 
complaisance and with lip-deep courtesy, they profess, 
like Scott's Lord-Keeper amid the ill-veiled penury at 
Wolfs Crag, to delight in the simplicity of "Mr. Balder- 
stone's bachelor's meal,' 3 and to be rather disgusted than 
pleased with the display on their own groaning board. 
" We do these things because others do them ; but I was 
bred a plain man at my father's frugal table, and I 
should like well would my wife and family permit me to 
return to my sowens and my poor man-of-mutton."* 

Dr. Holmes satirizes such sham philosophy in his 
stanzas on Contentment, where, for instance, the pro- 
fessed Plain Liver declares, 

" Plain food is quite enough for me ; 

Three courses are as good as ten ; — 
If Nature can subsist on three, 

Thank Heaven for three. Amen ! 
I always thought cold victual nice ; — 
My choice would be vanilla-ice. 

It requires the candour of a Charles Lamb to quote 
Coleridge's assertion that a man cannot have a pure 
mind who, refuses apple-dumplings, and append his own 
avowal, that with the decay of his first innocence he has 
a less and less relish daily for those innocuous cates. 
Elia could never have iterated, as Mr. Carlyle does, with 
admiring emphasis, this characteristic of the Dictator of 
Paraguay : "A grown man, like this Doctor Francia, wants 
nothing, as I am assured, but three cigars daily, a cup of 
mate, and four ounces of butchers' meat with brown 
bread." But Doctor Francia was a man to remind us of 
old Greece and Rome — notwithstanding the cigars. 

Plutarch tells us that while the Thebans with grateful 

* /. e., the blade-bone of a shoulder of mutton ; so called in 
Scotland, as in some parts of England it is called " a poor knight 
of Windsor," in contrast, Scott presumes, to the baronial Sir Loin. 



EPAMIXOXDAS, EPICURUS, ZEXO. 153 

hearts enjoyed the liberality and munificence of Pelopi- 
I )paminondas alone could not be persuaded to share 
in it. Pelopidas, however, is expressly said to have 
shared in the poverty of his friend, "glorying in a plain- 
;md slenderness of diet," and regarding it 
as a disgrace to expend more upon his own person than 
the poorest Theban. " As for Epaminondas, poverty was 
tiheritance, and therefore familiar to him ; but he 
made it still more light and easy by philosophy [Words- 
worth's high thinking], and by the uniform simplicity of 
his life" [Wordsworth's plain living]. 

Epicurus himself not only insisted on the necessity of 

moderation for continued enjoyment, but also, as his 

biographers show, he slighted, and somewhat scorned, all 

exquisite indulgences. " He fed moderately and plainly. 

Without interdicting luxuries, he saw that pleasure was 

purer and more enduring if luxuries were dispensed 

with." It was upon this ground, we are reminded, that 

Cynics and Stoics built their own exaggerated systems : 

too, saw that simplicity was preferable to luxury ; 

but the\- pushed their notion too far. Zeno, though of a 

constitution, lived to a great age, being rigidly 

tnious, his food consisting mainly of figs, bread, and 

And Persius records, as Englished by Dr. 

Brewster, 

" what wise, what wholesome truths 

h delivers to the listening youths ; 
• shorn disciples studious vigils keep, 
And wisdom's midnight page prefer to sleep : 
With humble husks of pease and beans arc fed, 
te no richer luxury than bread." 

hich picture, however, a parallel might be cited 
from the account given of English University fare, mid- 
pray in the sixteenth century, by Thomas Lever, after- 
wards Master of St. John's College, Cambridge He 

ibes the undergraduates — "divers of them," at least 



154 JOHNIANS OF AN OBSOLETE TYPE. 

— as rising daily between four and five o'clock, and 
spending the time between then and the dinner hour in 
chapel, private study, and the lecture-room : " At ten of 
the clock they go to dinner ; whereat they be content 
with a penny piece of beef amongst four, having a few 
pottage made of the broth of the same beef, with salt 
and oatmeal, and nothing else. After this slender 
dinner, they be either teaching or learning until five 
of the clock in the evening, when they have a supper 
not much better than their dinner. Immediately after 
which they go either to reasoning in problems, or 
unto some other study, until it be nine or ten of the 
clock ; and then, being without fire, are fain to walk 
or run up and down half an hour, to get a heat on 
their feet, when they go to bed." These simple stu- 
dents of the sixteenth century, with all their mathe- 
matical and arithmetical attainments, could scarcely 
have helped a poet of the nineteenth century much, 
in his bewilderment at the statistics of high living 
and its results : 

" The mind is lost in mighty contemplation 
Of intellect expended on two courses ; 
And indigestion's grand multiplication 
Requires arithmetic beyond my forces. 
Who would suppose, from Adam's simple ration, 
That cookery could have called forth such resources, 
As form a science and a nomenclature 
From out the commonest demands of nature ?" 

Noteworthy among the Roman emperors for the plain- 
est of plain living, if not the highest of high thinking, 
is Alexander Severus. His table, as we read in Gibbon, 
was served with the most frugal simplicity ; and when- 
ever he was at liberty to consult his own inclination, 
the company consisted of a few select friends, men of 
learning and virtue, amongst whom Ulpian was constant- 
ly invited. So again, but in a more advanced degree, 



AN EMPERORS FRUGAL SIMPLICITY. 155 

with Julian, whom the same historian describes as 
despising the honours and renouncing the pleasures, 
while discharging with incessant diligence the duties, of 
his exalted station ; and we are assured that few among 
hk subjects would have consented to relieve him of the 
weight of his diadem, had they been obliged to submit 
their time and their actions to the rigorous laws which 
the philosophic emperor imposed on himself. Libanius, 
one of his most intimate friends, and a frequent sharer 
in the frugal simplicity of his table, maintains that his 
light and sparing diet (which was usually of the vegetable 

left his mind and body always free and active for 
his multifarious duties. " While his ministers reposed, 
the prince flew with agility from one labour to another, 
and after a hasty dinner, retired into his library, till the 
public business, which he had appointed for the evening, 
summoned him to interrupt the prosecution of his 
studies. The supper of the emperor was still less sub- 
stantial than the former meal ; his sleep was never 
clouded by the fumes of indigestion." Dante reminds 

•in sacred story, how 

" Daniel fed 

On pulse, and wisdom gained The primal age 
Was beautiful as gold, and hunger then 
Made acorns tasteful ; thirst, each rivulet 
nectar. Honey and locust-, wire the I 
eon the Baptist in the wildei 
I, and that eminenceof glory reached 
hich th' Evangelist r< 

An Eastern scholar, adverting to the "sweet and simple 

life lived in Galilee," observes, by the way, that $old 

dlmat ompelling man to a perpetual contest with 

nal natur . too much value to be attached to 

: imfort and luxury ; while, on the other 

intries which awaken few desires are the 

countries <>f idealism, and there the aco of life 



156 PLAIN LIVING AND HIGH THINKING. 

are insignificant compared with the pleasure of living. 
" The embellishment of the house is superfluous, for it is 
frequented as little as possible. The strong and regular 
food of less generous climates would be considered heavy 
and disagreeable." Economy in the Western world is 
commended by an American essayist when its aim is 
grand, when it is the prudence of simple tastes, and is 
practised for freedom, or love, or devotion. But he 
objects that much of the economy we see in houses is 
of a base origin, and is best kept out of sight. " Parched 
corn eaten to-day that I may have roast fowl to my 
dinner on Sunday, is a baseness;" but parched corn, and 
a house with one apartment, that the man may be free 
of all perturbations of mind, serene and docile to instruc- 
tion from above, " is frugality for gods and heroes." It 
was a hard, griping poverty that we know Spinoza to 
have endured. Accounts of his expenditure were found 
among his papers after his death. One day he eats 
nothing but "a soupe au lait, with a little butter, which 
cost about three halfpence, and a pot of beer, which cost 
three farthings more." Another day he lives on a 
basin of gruel, with some butter and raisins, which cost 
him twopence-halfpenny. " And," says the pastor Cole- 
rus, quoted by Mr. Lewes, " although often invited out to 
dinner, he preferred the scanty meal that he found at 
home, to dining sumptuously at the expense of another." 
As he has been charged, among other indictments, with 
systematic Epicureanism, this illustration of his plain 
living, at the rate of twopence-halfpenny per diem, is 
worthy of record. 

Habitual preference of simple fare is characteristic of 
some distinguished men, though occasionally affected 
only, and preached by them on principle rather than 
practised in daily life. Dryden made a point of dining 
in the simplest manner. In a letter to an inviting friend 



A DIXXER OF HERBS WHERE LOVE IS. 157 

he sa; 3 for the rarities you promise, if beggars 

might be choosers, a part of a chine of honest bacon 
would please my appetite better than all the marrow 
puddings ; for I like them better plain, having a very 
vulgar stomach." Addison closes a Tatlcr, descriptive 
of a luxurious repast, overdone with ingenuities of cook 
and confectioner's art, with this significant paragraph : 
"As soon as this show was over, I took my leave, that I 
might finish my dinner at my own house : for as I in 
everything love what is simple and natural, so particularly 
in my food ; two plain dishes, with two or three good- 
natured, cheerful, ingenious friends, would make me 
more pleased and vain than all that pomp and luxury 
can bestow. For it is my maxim, ' That he keeps the 
I ible who has the most valuable company at 
It is pity, however, Mr. Walker, of the Original, 
feelingly complains, that one never sees luxuries and 
simplicity go together, and that people cannot under- 
stand that woodcocks and champagne are just as simple 
as fried bacon and small beer, or a haunch of venison as 
a leg of mutton, and that with true delicacies there is 
always so much alloy as to take away the true relish. 

But to revert, with one last glance, to the more im- 

rb-text. .And be the glance 

d-natured Lady Clavering, who had her 

tite and good-nature so sadly tried by constant 

famih nces, and disputes such as nuke the efforts 

of the b ch cook unpalatable, and the most 

delicately-stuffed hion hard to lie « 



• H I'd rather have a turnip f< than that pineapple, and 

■ 

t I could but have a little q 
chap. lix. 



XV. 

INTOLERANT OF REPROOF. 

Proverbs xv. 31, 32. 

THE ear that heareth the reproof of life is said by 
the Wise King to abide among the wise. He 
that heareth reproof getteth understanding ; but " he 
that refuseth instruction despiseth his own soul." They 
who would hear none of Wisdom's counsel, but despised 
all her reproof; they who set at nought all her counsel, 
and would none of her reproof; against them her sen- 
tence goeth forth, and this it is — that they shall eat of 
the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own 
devices. For them is it reserved to mourn at the last, 
when flesh and body are consumed, and to say with all 
the poignancy of belated regret, " How have I hated 
instruction, and my heart despised reproof ! " Poverty 
and shame are the foredoomed lot of him that refuseth 
instruction ; while he that regardeth reproof shall be 
honoured. " A fool despiseth his father's instruction ; 
but he that regardeth reproof is prudent." Prudence is 
of high esteem in the Book of Proverbs ; and one 
exercise of it is significantly advised, in refraining from 
reproof where it is sure to be taken ill : " He that re- 
proveth a scorner getteth to himself shame ; and he 
that rebuketh a wicked man getteth himself a blot." 
It is all very well to " rebuke a wise man," for " he will 
love thee ;" but the cautious counsel of the royal expert 
is, " Reprove not a scorner lest he hate thee." Whoso 
considereth his own comfort and ease will beware of the 
very thankless task of the censor, when it is a wolf he is 
taking by the ears, or a Wasp by the waist. 

When Cardinal Borromeo was put in mind of auy 



INTOLERAXT OF REPROOF. 159 



fault, he would express, what he actually felt, the most 
sincere gratitude ; and he is known to have given a 
commission to two " prudent and religious clergy " of 
his household, to remind him of anything they saw 
amiss in his actions ; and he used frequently to request 
the same favour of strangers. But then he was a saint 
of extra-canonical saintliness ; as remarkable for sin- 
cerity as for charity ; simply and singly in earnest, alike 
in dealing with himself and with others. He had laid 
to heart the spirit, if not learnt by heart the letter, of 
the mediaeval proverb, rich in rhymes and reason, — 

•• Argue consultum, te diliget; argue stultum, 
»rtet vultum, nee te dimittet inultum." 

The very thing which, as Feltham says, a proud man, 
and an angry one, stand most in need of to correct their 
failings, they are most in want of; and that is, the re- 
prehension of a friend. " Pride scorns a corrector, and 
thinks it a disparagement to learn : and Choler admits 
of no counsel which crosses him ; crossing angers him, 
and the choleric man's anger blinds him ; — so that if 

such hear of any fault, it must either be from an 
enemy, or from a friend who must make up his mind to 

them by it." South describes certain passionate 

itions, impatient of reproof, as "more raging and 

tumultuous than the sea itself, so that if Christ Himself 

should rebuke them, instead of being calm, they would 

and roar so much the louder." The admonition, 

that would reclaim others, but provokes them ; as the 

lame breath of wmd, that cools some things, kindles and 

inflames others. " X" sooner do some hear their be- 

l, though with the • nderness and 

a, but their choler begin s to boil, and their 

able t<> contain and keep it from running 

into the heights and furies of bitterness and im- 

ICe." Dr. South refers to the case of Xabal, to 



160 INTOLERANT OF REPROOF. 

whom it was surely of very great importance to be 
admonished of the " rough unadvised answer that he 
returned to David's soldiers," as this was like to have 
brought ruin upon him and his ; yet none would do 
Xabal that seasonable kindness, because of the rudeness 
and churlishness of his manners ; for he " was such a 
son of Belial, that a man could not speak to him." 
The complaint of Cassius is, — 

" A friend should bear his friend's infirmities, 
But Brutus makes mine greater than they are. 
Bru. I do not, till you practise them on me. 
Cas. You love me not. 
Bru, I do not like your faults. 

Cas. A friendly eye would never see such faults. 
Bru. A flatterers would not, though they do appear 
As huge as high Olympus.'"' 

In one of his letters to Mrs. Pilkington, Dean Swift 
tells her, that if she cannot take a chiding she will 
quickly be out of his sphere. " Corrigible people are to 
be chid ; those who are otherwise may be very safe from 
any lectures of mine ; I should rather indulge them in 
their follies than attempt to set them right." Many 
years before that, he had written in a tenderer tone to 
Stella, finding fault that she would not be found fault 

with : — 

' ; Your spirits kindle to a flame. 
Moved with the lightest touch of blame; 
And when a friend in kindness tries 
To show you where your error lies, 
Conviction does but more incense; 
Perverseness is your whole defence." 

Very different was the tone of Burns to Clarinda. Let 
her not tell him she is pleased when her friends inform 
her of her faults. He is ignorant what these are ; but 
he is sure they must be such " evanescent trifles " com- 
pared with her good qualities, that he would despise the 
ungenerous narrow soul who could notice any shadow of 



DISCRIMIXA TIOX IX FA UL T-FIXDIXG. 1 61 

imperfections she might seem to have in any other way 
than in the most delicate agreeable raillery. " Co.. 
minds are not aware how much they injure the keenly 
feeling tie of bosom-friendship, when in their foolish 
officiousness they mention what nobody cares for recol- 
lecting. People of nice sensibility- and generous minds 
have a certain intrinsic dignity, that fires at being trifled 
th, or lowered, or even too nearly approached.'' Dr. 

irew Combe held decided views on the inexpediency 
of friends becoming direct censors of each other's faul 

s impression was, after much thinking over the sub- 

:. and son rience to guide him, that we exert a 

more healthful and permanent influence on another by 
giv y possible encouragement to the good parts 

of his character, than by direct notice of the bad ; and 
that by thus strengthening the good we give him a 
more discerning " perception of his own failings," and a 
greater control over them, than we can ever ensure by 
merely counselling him directly against his errors. In 

;>ortion as a monitor within exceeds in weight and 

authority a monitor without, does the one method, in 

Combe's estimate, excel the other. Then, again, it 

cry difficult, he contends, for two friends to preserve 
:i confidence in each other after the direct notice 
"In spite of our best endeavours, a feeling, 
hov ;ht, of mortification creeps in to disturb the 

permanence of the influence ; and though the fault may 
be corrected, that f< the future power 

of the counsellor to benefit his friend." Nut but that 

• good doctor lirect censure on the part of 

gua uth, where the a es a natural 

the other, and to which the other feels 

himself naturally subject. I he 

doubted th r benefit of the direct naming of 

♦ts. Th il is apt to wince under the infliction 



i62 FAULT-FINDING BY SPECIAL REQUEST. 

of the mildest exhortation, even, after the manner of the 

recluse in Wordsworth, — 

" Shrinking from admonition, like a man 
Who feels that to exhort is to reproach." 

Perthes writes to his friend Nessig on the subject of 
his relations with Frederika, " I have been long thinking 
how I can write to her an affectionate letter of advice ; 
but though you may let a girl feel that you think her 
wrong, and although she is quite conscious of it, yet you 
must not venture to say it." Goldsmith's citizen of the 
world wastes his pains in compliance with the whim of 
" a lady who usually teazed all her acquaintance in 
desiring to be told of her faults, and then never mended 
any." Chesterfield was so entirely convinced of the 
greater readiness of people in general to be told of their 
vices or crimes than of their little failings and weak- 
nesses, that although he had been, he said, intimate 
enough with several people to tell them they had said 
or done a very criminal thing, he never was intimate 
enough with any man to tell him very seriously that he 
had said or done a very foolish one. He more than 
once urges his son to beg of the half-dozen real persons 
of quality with whom he associates, that they will cor- 
rect him, without reserve, wherever they see him fail, 
assuring them that he will take such admonitions as the 
strongest proofs of their friendship. " If any one can 
convince me of an error," professes Marcus Antoninus in 
his Meditations, " I shall be very glad to change my 
opinion, for truth is my business, and right information 
hurts no one." And in a later section he eulogizes his 
adoptive father, Antoninus Pius, for giving his courtiers 
all the freedom imaginable to contradict him and set 
him right. The mother of Mrs. Schimmelpenninck used 
to tell her that none could be without faults, but that 
she wished her child to be like Elzevir, who, as fast as 



FAULT-FINDING RESEXTED. 163 

he printed a sheet, put it up at his window, offering a 
reward to any one who could find a single mistake. 
Elzevir was much beloved, and the many real friends he 
possessed made a point of diligently looking out for 
error, and, thanks to their kindness, his editions 
secured the reputation of being the least faulty in the 
world. 

" Fear not the anger of the wise to raise; 
Those best can bear reproof who merit praise." 

There are a few people in the world, it is conceded, 
who relish unpalatable truths : they have a sort of itch 
for being criticized, provided always that things do not 
get too earnest, and that the quick is not touched. 
" Mais quand on a le gout faux, e'est une triste qualite 
que d'etre sincere," Araminte says in Marivaux' comedy 
of Lcs Sin circs. " I must touch upon the foibles of my 
oman with a gentle hand," writes Elia in the de- 
lightful essay on Mackery End, "for Bridget does not 
like to be told of her faults." Not that she was of the 
and recalcitrant type of the Wife of Bath, who 
indidly confesses that 

" whoe'er he be 



That tells my faults, I hate him mortally : 
And so do numbers more, I'll boldly say, 
. women, clergy — regular and lay.'' 

The : uch another type in Admiral Russell, 

1 Macaulay describes as resenting reproof, however 
an outrage. Crabbe's strolling player is an- 
tnother sphere of action : — 

- the temper, the unbending pride 

of this ally would no reproof abide." 

Swifl mmatic r thy a man should 

med to own he has been in the wrong — for 
her words, that he is wiser to-day 



164 PRONOUNCED INCAPACITY FOR 

than he was yesterday. But it is so disagreeable, as 
Adam Smith muses, to think ill of ourselves, that we 
often purposely turn away our view from whatever would 
ensure that unfavourable judgment And as he is said 
to be a bold surgeon whose hand does not tremble when 
he performs an operation upon his own person, so is he 
often equally bold, in Dr. Adam's opinion, " who does 
not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self- 
delusion, which covers from his view the deformities of 
his own conduct." Rather than see our own behaviour 
under so disagreeable an aspect, we too often, foolishly 
and weakly, " endeavour to exasperate anew those unjust 
passions which formerly misled us," — perhaps persevere 
in injustice, merely because, having once been unjust, we 
are ashamed and afraid to see and to say that we were 
so. Nay, discreet worthy people, according to Hazlitt, 
readily surrender the happiness of their whole lives, 
sooner than give up an opinion to which they have com- 
mitted themselves, though in all likelihood it was the 
mere turn of a feather which side they should take in 
the argument. In a controversy both parties will com- 
monly go too far, Archdeacon Hare remarks ; would 
you have your adversary give up his error ? be before- 
hand with him, and give up yours. That is on the prin- 
ciple that the said adversary will resist your arguments 
more sturdily than your example ; and indeed, on the 
presumption that if he is generous, you may even fear his 
overrunning on the other side, since there is nothing pro- 
vokes retaliation more than concession does. Gently to 
lay hand in hand is a procedure strongly recommended 
by Mr. Shirley Brooks, especially in conjugal discussions 
when differences arise ; the tongue being so very proud 
and sulky, and often refusing to say what the heart 
desires should be said, whereas the fingers know their 
duty, and are ready to convey an apologetic pressure 



OWNING OXESELF IN THE IVROXG. 165 

which will stop ninety-nine quarrels out of a hundred, 
at least where love is. " Specially will a wife do well to 
accept such a demonstration from her husband as full 
acknowledgment that he has been wrong and unjust, 
and begs her pardon ; statements which it is evident that 
no man with a real sense of his manly dignity could 
utter under any circumstances whatever." De Montfort, 
in the tragedy which bears his name, is not so anomalous 
as might be wished in his highly-pronounced aversion to 
►wning himself in the wrong. Some who so offend, 
observes Jerume, will afterwards such fair confession 
make as turns e'en the offence into a favour : — 

' muel. Yes, some indeed do so ; so will not he : 
He'd rather die than such confession make. 
Jcr. Ay. thou art right ; for now I call to mind 

That once he wrong'd me with unjust suspicion; 
And when it so fell out that I was proved 
Most guiltless of the fault, I truly thought 
'. ould have made profession of regret. 
But silent, haughty, and ungraciously 
He bore himself as one offended still.'' 

Gibbon characterizes Valentinian as that "haughty 

irch" who was "incapable of the magnanimity 

which dares to acknowledge a fault." Napoleon's rule 

that iii politics you must never retrace your steps : 

mmitted a fault, you must never show that 

are conscious of it : "error, steadily adhered to, 

1 virtue in the eyes of posterity." Even an 

arithmetical demonstration that he had been wrong in 

timate he had formed of the length of a march, or 

;th of a division, would not avail to alter his 

iid to have reasoned and acted exactly as 

if his previous calculation had been correct. Danilefsky 

in this respect with tin 
,ho on one occasion .said to Prince Volko- 
:y, in presence of the King of Prussia and a numer- 



1 66 CANDID AVOWAL OF ERROR. 

ous suite, "I wronged you yesterday, and I publicly 
ask your pardon." Napoleon, though greatly Alexander's 
superior in genius, could not, the historian asserts, have 
done this. His rather was the state of feeling analysed 
by a Scottish philosopher, under the consciousness of 
having committed wrong, when the feelings recoil 
inward, and, by some curious mystery in the nature 
of our selfishness, instead of prompting atonement, 
irritate us to repeat and persevere in the injustice. 
The Jonsonian Cicero is appropriately sententious in 
his utterance : 

" Bad men excuse their faults, good men will leave them. 
He acts the third crime that defends the first." 

Dr. Currie admired in Burns the candour and manli- 
ness of his avowals of error : " and his avowal was a 
reparation. His native fierte never forsaking him, the 
value of a frank acknowledgment was enhanced tenfold 
from its never being attended with servility."" Leigh 
Hunt warms to Mrs. Inchbald as " a candid confessor of 
her own faults, not in a pick-thank and deprecating 
style, but honest and heartfelt (for they hurt her craving 
for sympathy)." Madam Esmond, as portrayed by the 
elder of her sons, is a much commoner type of human 
nature : "I never heard that she repented of her injust- 
ice, or acknowledged it," he says, though in after days, 
the greater gentleness of her behaviour, when they met, 
may have been intended, he surmises, to imply her tacit 
admission that she had been wrong ; " but she made no 
apology, nor did I ask one." Contrast this old lady of 
fiction with that old lady of fact, the venerable memoir- 
writer of the Port Royalists, whose biographer testifies 
to her ready and full acknowledgment of error whenever 
convicted of it ; and adds, " How often have I seen her, 
with tears in her eyes, hold out her hand and ask pardon 



UNABLE TO OIVX OXESELF IN THE WROXG. 167 

for a hasty word, or some such trifle," of a servant per- 
haps, or of others, her inferiors in age, in mind, and in 
worth. 

Robert Spencer, in the Gordian Knot, is offered as a 
warning example of the man who never will admit that 
he has been to blame, that he has ever done a foolish 
thing or neglected a wise one. Of Queen Anne, and 
perhaps of more than one other queen, the story goes, 
that, walking in one of the royal parks with a maid of 
honour, she condescended to remark to her companion, 
" There is a man." " May it please your Majesty," the 
lady ventured to say, " I think it is a tree." u No ; it is 
a man," was the confident reply ; and they walked on 
till they reached, in fact, the stump of a tree. " I said 
it was a man/' was the queen's satisfied conclusion, in 
the unshaken conviction that it was impossible she 
ild ever be mistaken. Granting that so complete a 
victory over fact and common sense, so sublime a reach 
of self-reliance, is only to be met with in kings and 
queens whose word has been law from their cradle, yet 
-t of us, it is justly alleged, have had experience of 
sons nursed by adulation into such a habit of self- 
ifidence that if they once took a stump of a tree for 
nan they would stand by their mistake to the extent 
of maintaining it the right thing to have done — persuad- 
themselves that it argued nobler powers, a loftier 
ition, a mure comprehensive glance, and a finer 
1" the picturesque than to take the thing for what 
it was; that, in fact, the real fault lay with the prosaic 
ire which saw a stump and nothing more Arch- 
Whately somewhere compares men who will not 
retract and retrace their steps, to turkeys in a trap : 
finding himself " in a pen/'' such a man, rather than 
> far as to own a mistake and "walk- 
out" of the error the same way he had walked into 



I6S RELUCTANT TO RETRACT. 

it, will resort to every kind of shuffle ; he will insist 
on it that he was quite right all along, but that there 
had been a change in the people, or in the circum- 
stances ; or perhaps he will flatly deny that he ever 
said so and so ; or maintain that he was misunder- 
stood ; — anything rather than retract and acknowledge 
an error. Nature worketh in us all, says Hooker, a 
love to our own counsels, and the contradiction of 
others is a fan to inflame that love. " Our love, set 
on fire to maintain that which once we have done, 
sharpeneth the wit to dispute, to argue, and by all 
means to reason for it"* It is Hooker's genial bio- 
grapher that says of another of the renowned divines 
whose " Lives " he has written with such graphic force, 
that, if the rest of mankind would, like Dr. Sanderson, 
not conceal their alteration of judgment, but confess 
it to the honour of God and themselves, then would 
our nation become freer from pertinacious disputes, 
and fuller of recantations. Papebroch owned to Mabil- 
lon the pain he at first felt in reading the great 
Benedictine's refutation of his book, " in a manner so 
conclusive," but declared his antagonist's treatise to 
have entirely overcome that weakness by its power, 
beauty, and truth. Malebranche was frank in avowing 
that he had condemned Jansenius without reading him, 
for which he now implored the pardon of God and of 
man. Whatever the merit of Dr. Mead's medical Essays, 
their author is credited with a noble display of 
candour in retracting, in a second edition, forty years 
later, not a few of his former opinions, acknowledging 

* " O merciful God ! " is the beginning of another passage in 
which the "judicious 77 Hooker laments weak and wilful man's 
reluctance to " show an acknowledgment of error in that which 
once we have unadvisedly taken upon us to defend.' 7 — Preface to the 
Ecclesiastical Polity, § ii. and § viii. 



RECEDIXG AXD RECAST IXC. 169 

that u in some facts he had been mistaken, and in some 
conclusions too precipitate." Locke is honourably eager, 
in his prefatory epistle to the reader, to avow himself 
convinced of having been in error on certain meta- 
physical points — " thinking myself more concerned to 
quit and renounce any opinion of my own, than oppose 
that of another, when truth appears against it." He 
emphasizes therefore his forwardness to resign any 
opinion he has, and to recede from anything he may 
have written, on cause being shown. Dryden's biogra- 
phers do well to admire the frankness with which he 
acknowledged an error ; witness his renunciation of the 
: rhyme in plays, once so strenuously defended by 
him. And to his honour they impute it, that having 
written all too many lines which, dying, he could wish to 
blot, he did wish to purge or burn if he could ; his own 
words (written in 1699) are, "which I should be well 
contented I had time either to purge or to see them 
fairly burned." Hearne makes memorable among his 

randa of Anthony a Wood, that "no one was more 

to correct his mistakes," and that "he was always 

Well pleased when he was shew'd them." If he had a 

I character while yet alive for this openness 

tndour, the more hopefully might Clarendon's son 
appeal to him, as through Dodwell we find 

•rdship doing, to " own in open court, and get it 

I," that he was "sorry for having been made an 

Instrument by the misinformation of others, for aspersing 

ther's memory. His L (1 ship< herein," adds 

•11, "are so very just and becoming him that 
I do n h you can ood Christian refuse 

The poor and untaught are noted 

impossible to a proud nature-, that, 
rather than say the word, they will encounter any 

.A of hardship and privation. But of all gr 



i/o MA GNANIMITY IN RETRA CTING. 

ing, unwilling apologizers, an honest child is held to be 
the greatest :* to him to have to say, " I have been to 
blame ; I am sorry," is the bitterness of humiliation ; 
for he has learnt no subterfuge, finds no soothing emol- 
lient in the way of doing it, but stands in the depths 
in which his elders only profess to find themselves. 

William Spence makes very "honourable mention" 
indeed of the magnanimous readiness of his reverend 
collaborates, William Kirby, to own himself wrong in 
matters entomological when once convinced of it. 
" How few men in his position as one of the first of 
European entomologists .... would have had 
their minds open to the conviction of having been in 
error " in a certain anatomical detail, " and would 
have had the candour to admit that this error had 
been pointed out by a mere tiro in the science ! " 
Alexander Wilson, the ornithologist, does not enjoy 
the same reputation in this respect His biographer, 
Mr. Ord, says of him that he was of the genus irri- 
tabile, and obstinate in opinion ; and that although it 
ever gave him pleasure to acknowledge error when the 
conviction resulted from his own judgment alone, he 
could not endure to be told of mistakes. Hence his 
associates had to be sparing of their criticisms, for 



* Such as Molly in Mrs. GaskelTs latest and unfinished, yet most 
finished, story. She and old Miss Browning go to bed one night 
chafed and angry with each other ; anon Molly is crying tears of 
penitence and youthful misery, when there comes a low tap at the 
door, and there stands the elderly spinster in a wonderful erection 
of a nightcap, who wants to say, " We've got wrong to-day, some- 
how, and I think it was perhaps my doing. ... I rather think 
I was a little cross. We'll not say any more about it, Molly ; only 
we'll go to sleep friends. . . ." " I was wrong, — it was my 
fault," says Molly, kissing her. " Fiddlesticks ! don't contradict 
me ! I say it was my fault, and I won't hear another word about 
it" — Wives and Daughters, chap. xiii. 



REFUSING TO OWN ONESELF IN THE WRONG. 171 

fear of forfeiting his friendship. Richard Kinvan, the 

chemical philosopher, some of whose views were 

refuted by Lavoisier, is applauded for the candour, 

"too rarely exhibited," of admitting the erroneousness 

of what he had taught. It is recognized as one of 

the oldest maxims of the newspaper world, that no 

rnal should ever admit that it has made a mistake: 

it may eat its words, or explain them away, or simply 

leave the whole subject alone ; but to say, in black 

and white, that an error has been committed, is always 

held inadmissible. Hence when a (not the) leading 

journal, some years ago, to its credit, and to the credit 

of English journalism, boldly owned that it had been 

completely wrong on a critical point of Italian politics, 

the confession might well make a sensation among 

observant readers, and be noted as an innovation on 

the established custom of the daily press. The paper 

in question gained honourable mention for not holding 

the tradition ; being wrong, it said it was wrong, 

lers felt that it was quite in keeping with 

general character that it should "venture on such 

imprudent truthfulness." No two things, it has been 

1, are more opposite than the volunteered and the 

compulsory y ; as that man of a violent temper 

. who, perpetually precipitated by it into scrapes, 

after frankly avowing himself in the wrong to the per- 

had injured, would add, "The worst of this 

<>f mine is, that I have to apologize to f«> 

fusal ever to own himself in the 

it William Pcnn for instance, has often been 

ment by even the most appreciative and 

f his critics. A Saturday Reviewer, f<>r 

Id it for undeniable that the members and 

cicty of Friends were perfectly justified 

in keeping up a controversy in which the assailant 



172 RESOLVED NOT TO RETRACT. 

obstinately refused to acknowledge his defeat. This was 
in 1859, in a notice of Mr. Paget's Inquiry (Blackwood, 
1858), in which reference was also made to Mr. Jardine's 
citation of seventy-two cases of judicial torture which 
occurred during the time of its alleged discontinuance ; 
yet a subsequent edition of the Bacon essay only con- 
tained a concise statement that the author saw no reason 
to modify his assertion. He felt " quite satisfied," said 
the same reviewer, or at least the same Review, some 
years later, and this in spite of overwhelming proof of 
his error, that his " monstrous charges " against William 
Penn were perfectly true. He would, it is affirmed, have 
equally felt " quite satisfied " that the " oak groves J 
under which, in his History, he describes the Fellows 
of Magdalen as walking, were oak groves, on whatever 
authority he might have been assured that the trees were 
remarkably fine elms. If the President and all the 
Fellows of the College, adds his censor, had come in 
person to testify that the trees under which they spent 
their lives were elms, and not oaks, he would only have 
said that, to judge by that specimen of their knowledge 
and veracity, they must be " dunces or something 
worse." * 



* The phrase applied by him to Gieseler, in reference to a pas- 
sage from Lactantius, about which Earl Stanhope had shown his 
noble friend to be in error. 



XVI. 

WHISPERED-A WA Y FRIENDSHIPS. 

Proverbs xvi. 28. 

IT is the effect, if not the intent and purpose, of the 
frowardness of the froward, to sow strife, and of the 
whisperings of the whisperer, to separate chief friends. 
Purpose is indicated, the full intent of malice afore- 
thought, in that subsequent verse which describes the 
froward man shutting his eyes to devise froward things ; 
and " moving his lips he bringeth evil to pass." Moving 
his lips merely, and hardly that ; a wily whisperer is 
skilled in the shifts and subterfuges of sotto voce sugges- 
tions. He shuts his eyes quite while forming his plans, 
to give himself up entirely to the crafty completion of 
them. He almost shuts his lips when the plans are ripe 
f>r perpetration ; just a murmuring escapes from them, 
a muttering, a mere moving of the lips ; and even so 
the mutterer bringeth evil to pass, and even so the 
whisperer separateth chief friends. 

And thus it chanced, says the poet of Christabel> " as 
I divine, with Roland and Sir Leoline. 

.'as ! they had been friends in youth ; 
But whispering tongues can poison truth . . . 
• • • # 

h spake words of high disdain 

, insult to his heart's best brother ; 
They parted — ne'er to meet again !'' 

The Latin proverb affirms that lingua susurronis est 
r felle draconis. That strange lust of mangling repu- 

on hearts the least wantonly cruel, 
is the marvel of a student in psychology, who remarks, 

" Let two idle tongues titter a tale against some third 



174 POISON OF WHISPERING TONGUES. 

person who never offended the babblers, and how the 

tale spreads, like fire, lighted none know how, in the 

' herbage of an American prairie : who shall put it out ! " 

" Ah ! well the Poet said, in sooth, 
That ' whispering tongues can poison Truth/ — 
Yes, like a dose of oxalic acid, 
Wrench and convulse poor Peace, the placid, 
And rack dear Love with internal fuel, 
Like arsenic pastry, or, what is as cruel, 
Sugar of lead, that sweetens gruel." 

So at least it was with "the whisper of tongues in 
Tringham," in the Tale of a Trumpet, a tale of very 
tragical mirth : — 

" The Social Clubs dissolved in huffs, 
And the Sons of Harmony came to cuffs, 
While feuds arose, and family quarrels, 
That discomposed the mechanics of morals, 
For screws were loose between brother and brother, 
While sisters fastened their nails on each other ; 
Such wrangles, and jangles, and miff, and tiff, 
And spar, and jar, and breezes as stiff 
As ever upset a friendship or skiff ! 
The plighted Lovers, who used to walk, 
Refused to meet, and declined to talk ; 
And wish'd for two moons to reflect the sun, 
That they mightn't look together on one ; 
While wedded affection ran so low, 
That the eldest John Anderson snubbed his Jo — 
And instead of the toddle adown the hill, 

Hand in hand, 

As the song has plann'd, 
Scratch'd her, penniless, out of his will ! " 

One of Dr. Thomas Brown's ethical lectures concerns 
the peculiar people who " rejoice in suggesting thoughts 
that may poison the confidence of friends," and who, 
as he describes them, are faithful in conveying to 
every one the whispers of unmerited scandal, of which, 
otherwise, the listener in question would never have 
heard, as he never could have suspected them. There 



EECA'LESS.YESS OF WANTON GOSSIP. 175 

is no class of people held to be more universally and 
more justly reprobated and disliked than those who 
fetch and carry the scandal which they have not even 
the wit to invent : bred in low levels of society, they 
arc likened to an epidemical malaria, infecting the 
atmosphere in which they live with their pestilential 
influences. Nor is it accepted as a real extenuation 
of the mischief they work, that the poison they spread 
is not of their own manufacture. A great deal more 
of the harm done by calumny is declared to be due 
to the recklessness of wanton gossip than to deliberate 
and malicious detraction. Wisely wary is the Frontin 
of Gresset (in Lc Mediant) : — 

•' Lcs rapports font toujours plus de mal que dc bicn ; 
Et dc tout lc passe je ne sais jamais rien." 

The two great classes of promoters of social happi- 
according to Sir Arthur Helps, are cheerful people, 
and people who have some reticence ; and the latter he 
accounts to be more secure benefits to society than even 
the former : they are non-conductors of all the heats 
and animosities around them. To have peace in a 
house, or a family, he says, or in any social circle, the 
members of it must beware of passing on hasty and 
uncharitable speeches ; for such a passing on, the whole 
of the context seldom being told, is often not conveying 
but creating mischief. 

Look into great families, says Dr. South, and you 

shall find some one paltry talebearer who, l>y carrying 

i from one t" another, shall inflame the: minds and 

mpose the quiet of all concerned : from families 

to towns or cities, and "two or three pragmatical, 

, meddling fellows (men of business sonv 
• by the venom of their false tongues .shall set the 
whole neighbourhood together by the ears." The' 
bUukies whisper in the old ballad of Jamie 1) 



176 THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL. 

breeds woe for those whispered about, and brings a 
malediction on the whisperer : — 

" An' wae betide ye, black Fastness ! 
Ay, and an ill deid may ye die ; 
Ye was the first and foremost man 
Wha parted my true lord and me." 

The Mrs. Clackitt of the School for Scandal is com- 
mended by Lady Sneerwell as having, truly, a very 
pretty talent for talebearing, and a great deal of industry 
in whispering away a good character or an old friend- 
ship ; and Snake owns her to have been pretty successful 
in her day ; for to his knowledge she has been the cause 
of six matches being broken off, and three sons being 
disinherited ; of four forced elopements, and as many 
close confinements ; of nine separate maintenances, and 
two divorces. If Joseph Surface is ready with his sen- 
tentious protest, " The licence of invention some people 
take is monstrous indeed," and Maria, with her more 
sincere one, " 'Tis so ; but, in my opinion, those who 
report such things are equally culpable," — so is Mrs. 
Candour with her characteristic " To be sure they are : 
tale-bearers are as bad as the tale-makers — 'tis an old 
observation, and a very true one ; but what's to be 
done ? how will you prevent people from talking ? " — 
above all, such people as Mrs. Candour herself, who is 
too candid to do ill by stealth, and too open to affect 
whispering. One can give her credit for a certain con- 
stitutional contempt for mere whisperers as a feeble folk, 
— and for almost a good-humoured though not too good- 
natured enjoyment of the sarcastic things we find in 
print about people given to whispering, whatever th< 
matter (harmful or harmless) conveyed in that objection- 
able mode. Let us glance at some of these sundry 
takings-off, in the act and manner. 

Pope's couplet is a noteworthy one about Fannius, — 



U'HISPERIXG BUSY-BODIES. 177 

•" impudently near, 

When half his nose is in his Prince's ear.'' 

This is a more telling attitude, a more tell-tale or tale- 
telling one, than that indicated by Cowper, whose 
emphatic speaker dearly loves to oppose, in contact 
inconvenient, nose to nose, as if the gnomon on his 
neighbour's phiz, touched with the magnet, had at- 
tracted his ; and whose 

" whisper d theme, dilated and at large, 

Proves after all a wind-gun's airy charge." 

:ere pictures in Timante a pretentious, platitudin- 
'.lisperer of this sort ; a busy-body, who yet, like 
Chaucer's lawyer, seems busier than he is, and of whose 
business nobody is the better : — 

- ins cesse il a tout bas, pour rompre l'entretien, 
Yn secret a vous dire, et ce secret n'est rien ; 
De la moindre ve'tille il fait une merveille, 
Et, jusques au bonjour, il dit tout a l'oreille." 

Characteristic it is, at one end of the scale of society, 
of Lewis the Eleventh, as described by Philippe de 
Comines, that he aimait a parley en iorcillc. So is it, 
at the other end, of such a typical personage as Earn- 
Gordian Knot, that, being an uncomfortable 
sort of man, he cannot say a thing and have done with 
it, but whispers, and noses his neighbour's ear, — 
:ene with Harris, whom he would keep addre 
"in a low whisper. Harris tried to keep him off by 
- of tobacco smoke, but there was no getting 
him to sit up and speak out." Swift was plainspoken 
,h in characterizing and apostrophizing one of this 
complexion, with, says he, 

"Th> formal nods, important sn< 
Thy whisper! 1 in all c.i 

...ch are, whatever you may think, 
;»ed up in 



178 WEARISOME WHISPERERS. 

Nothing but the revolution of an umbrella can keep 
some folks from mouthing a neighbour's ear. Master 
Oliver Proudfute is distinguished in Scott for the zeal 
with which he, " busy bonnet-maker," whispers unim- 
portant but fussy communications into sundry ears. 
A modern literary man about town is graphic anent 
the peculiar occupants of the benches of the Royal 
Exchange piazza — lank, mystic-looking men, mostly 
advanced in years, and shiny in threadbare black cloth, 
who converse with one another in furtive whispers, the 
cavernous mouth screened by the rugose hand, with its 
knotted cordage of veins and its chalkstoned knuckles, 
as though the whisper were of such commercial moment 
that the whisperer feared its instantaneous transport to 
the ears of Rothschild or Baring, and the consequent 
uprising or downfalling of stocks or corn, silk or tallow. 
In one of his extant letters to Cicero, M. Ccelius adverts 
to the many ugly reports current about Caesar, "but 
propagated only in whispers," — not yet publicly 
talked of, " but among the few, whom you know, told 
openly by way of secrets ; Domitius never mentions 
them without clapping his hand to his mouth." The 
Fungus of Salmagundi is one of those fidgeting, med- 
dling quidnuncs, one of your " Q in the corner " fellows, 
who speak volumes with a wink, and convey most por- 
tentous information by mumbling at your ear. Highly 
undesirable acquaintance in the streets of London are 
those " duffers " who accost their intended dupes while 
walking by their side, and usually speak in a half- 
whisper, as they keep pace with them, and look mysteri- 
ously and misgivingly around as if for a Custom-house 
officer within earshot, while they moot the delicate 
question of bandanas or cigars. When Captain Brazen, 
in Farquhar's comedy, approaches Worthy with a confi- 
dential " Harkye, my dear ! " the other rebuffs his 



MRS. CANDOUR'S SORT OF GOOD-NATURE. i~e 

stealthy mode of advance with the reminder, "Whis- 
pering, sir, before company is not manners ; and when 
nobody's by, 'tis foolish." One of Moore's satires, dated 
while prelates yet wore wigs, takes off a certain 

" baronet of many words, 

Who loves so, in the House of Lords, 
To whisper Bishops — and so nigh 
Unto their wigs in whispering goes, 
That you may always know him by 
A patch of powder on his nose." 

The subject of such sub audita may often be inoffensive 
enough, but there is offence (nay but there is, Horatio) 
in the mode of communication. If the whisper, how- 
ever, be malicious, how great is that malice — the greater 
for the littleness of the conveyance. If the whisperer 
be malignant, how base is that malignity — the baser for 
the meanness of his 'bated breath. In denying good- 
nature to Mrs. Candour, this much of qualification 
ild be understood, that there is no denying it to her 
in the sense of those double d'd "good-natured friends 
Sir Fretful Plagiary is so unthankful for, and through 
whom he is sure to hear of the abuse heaped on him by 
his ill-natured foes. Jack Ilobbleday, of Little Pedling- 
ton, is a counterpart of Mrs. Candour: having got hold 
a book of reckless personalities, he is indefatigable in 
ulating it where it may give most pain and br< 
t animosities : " People are fools to notice such 
thing-,," quoth he: " I have shown the book- to, at lei 
nty of my most intimate friends, pointed out t • 

them the m able things said about theil.- 

I peace and quietness recommend 

them to take no notice of it — never to think - 
law about it. But there they air, all of them, going 
it, dii In the v< ry book in question J 

>blcday himself is .led, heterographical 



180 THE FRIENDS WHO FETCH AND CARRY 

11 the best natured little fellar in Little Pedlington, but 
somehow sets more people by the years than all the ill- 
natured fellars together. Would set the greatest friends 
in all ainshunt history a-quareling — Damon and Pickaxe, 
Restus and Pillydus," etc., etc., etc. The " friends " of 
Cadurcis in Mr. Disraeli's Venetia, having got hold of 
what is too good a story about him, or against him, to 
be coughed down, or frowned down, or hushed up, or 
talked out, circulate the authentic tale with the most 
considerate assiduity, and are all anxiety to ensure its 
arriving at the proper address. Mr. Folair, the provincial 
actor, takes prodigious pains to keep Nicholas Nickleby 
au courant, or well posted up, in all the abuse that is 
afloat against him behind h;s back. Lenville says this, 
and says that, and very damaging his sayings are : " I 
mention it as the friend of both parties, and in strict 
confidence. / don't agree with him, you know." It is 
a low-life latter-day reproduction of Scott's Sir Mungo 
Malagrowther, who, having heard bad news of and for 
young Nigel in the Tower, is for instantly starting to 
visit the " poor lad," and bestow some comfort on him. 
" The lad will want a pleasant companion, who can tell 
him the nature of the punishment which he is to suffer, 
and other matters of concernment. I will not leave him 
until I show him how absolutely he hath ruined himself 
from feather to spur, how deplorable is his present state, 
and how small is his chance of mending it." Save me 
from my friends, may well be a deprecation in request ; 
especially from the " good-natured " sort. 

Mrs. Piozzi mentions in her correspondence a break- 
fast-party at Samuel Lysons', when he oddly pointed to 
some shelf in his chambers, crying, " There, there they 
are ; I gathered up every paper, every nonsense that 
was written against you [Mrs. Thral'e] at the time of 
your marriage [to Piozzi] ; everything to ridicule either 



WHATEVER REPORT IS UNFRIENDLY. 1S1 

of you that could be found ; and there they are." 
u Thank you," said the lady, and the conversation 
changed. It was on their way home that John Kemble, 
one of the party, remarked that Lysons made it his 
business to come and tell him every disagreeable thing 
he could think on concerning himself; every ballad, 
every satirical criticism he could hear of. When 
lerick the Great told some protesting Prussians who 
remonstrated against his patronage of Voltaire, that he 
only meant to use the brilliant Frenchman as one sucks 
an orange, and then throw him aside, a good-natured 
friend was not wanting to repeat the happy phrase to 
the unhappy person concerned : " La Metrie ne manqua 
pas de me rendre ce bel apophthegme digne de Denis 
de Syracuse."* When indeed was ever a fetcher and 
carrier of such edged tools of speech, a snapper-up ot 

h unconsidered trifles of malice, manquant? Doctor 
Primrose, sometime vicar of Wakefield, has this family 

perience to record: "Scandalous whispers began to 
circulate at our expense, and our tranquillity was con- 
tinually disturbed by persons who came as friends to tell 

what was said of us by enemies." The autobiographer 
of a Strange Story renounces off-hand the future friend- 
ship of one such professing friend. Mr. Spectator, with 
.ill ln's placidity, is fain to own that he "could never bear 
one of those officious friends that would be telling e\ 
malicious report, every idle censure, that passed upon 
Again and again in Byron's letters we come upon 

other hand, when Frederick ,e supply of his 

es to Voltaire with a request to have them returned, with re- 
marks and < , the aside of the French wit, " See what a 
intity of his dirty linen the king has I i wash!" 
1 by talebearers to the royal ear, and Frederick 
as much ince I i burrow M icaulay's simile, a Grub Si 
r who had found his name in the Ounciad. 



1 82 WHISPERED-A WA Y FRIENDSHIPS. 

such a passage as, " A ' Good-natured Friend ' tells me 
there is a most scurrilous attack on us [coupling his 
publisher Mr. Murray with himself] in the Anti-jacobin 
Review ;" or as this, in a postscript to Moore : " I never 
heard the ' report ' you mention, nor, I dare say, many 
others. But, in course, you, as well as others, have — 
' good-natured friends ' who do their duty in the usual 
way." Landor, in his Tuscan retreat, professedly never 
looked for nor saw the literary strictures of his foes : the 
whole world might write against him, and leave him 
ignorant of it to the day of his death. " A friend who 
announces to me such things, has performed the last 
act of his friendship." It was no more pardonable, in 
Walter Savage Landor's opinion, freely and figuratively 
expressed, with a local aptitude of illustration, than to 
lift up the gnat-net over his bed, on pretext of showing 
him there were gnats in the room. " If I owed a man 
a grudge, I would get him to write against me ; but if 
anybody owed me one, he would come and tell me of 
it." Cicero bids "the gods confound that Segulius, the 
greatest knave that is, or was, or ever will be," for fetch- 
ing and carrying, and mischief-making in news-bearing, 
between him and his friends. The Autocrat of the 
Breakfast-table enjoins us not to flatter ourselves that 
friendship authorizes us to say disagreeable things to 
our intimates ; on the contrary, the nearer we come into 
relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and 
courtesy become. " Except in cases of necessity, which 
are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant truths 
from his enemies ; they are ready enough to tell them." 
A man that is a friend must show himself friendly, but 
not in that sort of way. 

It is pleasant to find a man one might have suspected 
of being, in his own despite, a little, or more than a little, 



HOW COXFIDEXCE IS DESTROYED. 1S3 

hardened by a long course of selfish indulgence, as Lord 
March, writing to " my dear George " Selwyn, to hope he 
does not think that anybody, or anything, can make a 
tracasserie between them two. " I must be the poorest 
creature upon earth ... if any one alive can make 
any impression upon me when you are concerned," let 
gossips and talebearers tell or do their worst. Mr. 
Hayward claims credit for his lordship's soundness of 
both head and heart in this respect and on this account ; 
and he suggests how large an amount of unhappiness 
might be prevented by the universal adoption of the 
principle — never to listen to, much less believe, the 
alleged unkindness of a friend. All of us, as he re- 
marks, have our dissatisfied, complaining, uncongenial 
moments, when we may neglect ordinary attentions, or 
let drop words utterly at variance with the habitual 

ions of our hearts. These, he adds, are repeated 
from design or carelessness : then come complaints and 
explanations; confidence is destroyed; "the credulous 
hope of mutual minds is over;" and thus ends at once 
the solace of a life. 

* * * * * 

charming woman of the social essayist is ironically 

the gentlest of her sex, and would not do a cruel thing 

nor say an unkind word for the world : when she tells 

you the unpleasant things which ill-natured people hav< 

friends or hers, she tells them in the sweetest 

way imaginable : she is so sure there is not 

liable of truth in it all ; and what a shame it is that 

hould be so ill-natured ! " In the gentle torn 

ipathy and deprecation peculiar to her, she gives you 

all the ugly and uncomfortable reports that have come 

her, «>f which you have never heard a breath until 

this moment ; yet it is you who arc stupid, for .she tells 

tluin to if they were of patent notoriety to the 



1 84 WHISPERED-A WA Y FRIENDSHIPS. 



whole world ; only she does not believe them, re- 
member ! " Considering the scrupulous care she takes 
to deny and defend as she retails, you cannot class her 
with the tribe of the ill-natured whom she censures : yet 
you wish she had not told you : the excuse dies away 
from your memory, but the ill-savoured report roots, and 
you feel that you have lost your respect for your former 
friends for ever. Downright ill-nature is affirmed to be 
a rarer quality than some persons suppose ; and half the 
detraction of society is done unconsciously and by good- 
natured pleasant people. 

Let none hope to win the love of Schiller's Don 
Caesar, that with malicious tales encroach upon a 
brother's ear, and point — 

" With busy zeal of false officious friendship, 
The dart of some rash angry word, escaped 
From passion's heat : — it wounds not from the lips, 
But swallowed by suspicion's greedy ear, 
Like a rank poisonous weed, embittered creeps, 
And hangs about the heart with thousand shoots, 
Perplexing Nature's ties." 

And in that way the talebearing whisperer separateth 
chief friends ; sets brother against brother, and shakes 
off, as no one else can, the friend that sticketh closer than 
a brother. 



XVII. 

FAIR- WE A THER FRIEXDS. 

PROVERES xvii. i j ; xix. 7. 

IF one swallow makes not summer, so neither do 
summer friends by the score make one friend for 
life. A summer friend is for summer wear. Who shall 
warrant him winter-proof ? There is more by a great 
deal of summer than of friendship in his make-up. 
Summer friends come like swallows, so depart. Fair 
weather brings them ; come foul, and they are gone. He 
that sang in the Forest of Arden " Blow, blow, thou 
winter wind," called the boreal blast he invoked " not so 
unkind as man's ingratitude;" and declared most friend- 
ship to be feigning ; and sang again, " Freeze, freeze, 
thou bitter sky," " Thy sting is not so sharp as friend 
remembered not." So collapses many a Midsummer 
t's Dream of present friendship into a bleak Win- 
Tale of friendship fled. Now, a friend, in the 
authentic sense, as wise men understand it, and as the 
King defines it, "A friend loveth at all times, and 
a brother is born for adversity." At all times, bad as 
well as good, f. »r worse as well as for better. In all sea- 
autumn's darkening decline as well as spring's 
s outburst, — winter's chill darkness that may be 
felt, not less than summer's prodigality of sunshine. 
But the Wise King knew as well in his day the tricks 
3 and laches of summer friends, as any deluded 
and f victim can know, in this our late day, upon 

I the end of the nineteenth century is coming, 
true is poor human nature to itself 
lisputable a fact in the days of Solo- 
mon as it is in our own, that " all the brethren of the 



186 FAIR-WEATHER FRIENDS. 

poor do hate him ; how much more do his friends go far 

from him ! he pursueth them with words, yet they are 

wanting to him." Poverty parts good company. And 

then is seen and laid to heart as never before, that a 

friend in winter time is a friend for all time ; that a 

friend in need is a friend indeed. 

It is a theme Ovid harps upon. So long as things go 

well with you, says he, many are the friends you may 

reckon, if not reckon upon ; but let clouds gather, and 

anon you are left to yourself. 

" Donee eris felix multos numerabis amicos ; 
Tempora si fuerint nubila, solus eris." 

Elsewhere again ; no one, he says, is beloved but the 

man whom Fortune favours ; the first faint clap of her 

thunder startles into flight the whole pack of summer 

friends, who verily stay not on the order of their going, 

but go at once. 

" Diligitur nemo nisi cui Fortuna secunda est, 
Quae, simul intonuit, proxima quasque fugat." 

And in another place the same poet, who had seen 
life, and life in high places too, sententiously moralizes 
on the care taken by ants never to waste time and 
trouble in wending their way to an empty granary ; just 
so, no friend, of the fair-weather sort, will stultify himself 
by visiting those who have come to the end of their 
wealth. 

" Horrea formicae tendunt ad inania nunquam ; 
Nullus ad amissas ibit amicus opes." 

Prosperity hath many friends, says the adage : Felici- 
tas multos habet amicos. But the complexion of their 
friendship is that of the "mahogany" — table friends 
they are, who will be off when Timon's board is empty 
and himself undone. Est amicus socius mensce, et 11011 
permanebit in die necessitatis. Seneca can get but a 
distant view of the friends of the unfortunate, so 



POVERTY PARTS GOOD COMPANY. 187 

cautions arc they not to come too near : Viri infelicis 

procul amici. Plautus computes the tenacity of such 

friendship by the scale of a man's means ; let him be 

reduced, and his hangers-on fall off. " Ut cuique ho- 

mini res parata est, firmi amici sunt ; si res lassa labat 

Itidem amici collabuscunt." The lapse of wealth is 

the collapse of that social circle. So Thcognis, in a 

ige familiar in analecta books : If you are wealthy, 

that poet, you will have friends in plenty ; but 

1 poor, and they will be few, and you will have 

forfeited your reputation as a good fellow. 

Ei pkv yap 7rXouT7/? 7roXXot (plXui, *)u 8e nevqai 
Uavpoi, k ovKfff 6po)9 avrus auijp uyaObs. 

the pot boil, and friendship will keep hot the 
while : Zel yyrpa, fyj cf>i\ia : Ferret olla, vivit amicitia. 
Horace, for the boiling pot, has the well-filled cask ; 
empty that, and there is a flight of friends in all direc- 
: Diffugiiint, cadis Cum fcece sice at is, amici Ferre 
m pariter dolosi. The)- will, some of them, stay on 
for the draining of the dregs; but not a second later. 
When we are happy, in the spring-tide of abundance, 
flood of plenty, as Feltham words it, the 
our servant ; then all men flock about us, 
with bare head-, and bended bodies, and protesting 
Hut when these pleasant waters "fall to ebb- 
when wealth but shifts to another hand ; these men 
upon us at a distance, and stiffen themselves as if 
in armour ; lest, if they should come nigh us, 
1 wound in the el" c." There is what 
tl uthor of Middlcmarch calls a cold air surrounding 
down in the world, and people are- glad to 
v.iy from them, as from a cold room: human 
men and women, without furniture-, with- 
out anything to < 1, who havi to count 
I an cmbarra n of 



FAIR-WEATHER FRIENDS. 



reasons for wishing to see them, or of subjects on 
which to converse with them." Noureddin's eaves- 
dropper-friend who overhears the steward's dismal 
report to his master of failing means, loses no time in 
repeating it to the company, and they lose none in 
giving Noureddin the cold shoulder. Another of the 
Arabian Nights' tales is pointed at, or points, the 
same moral ; the prodigal hospitality of Abon Hassan 
is suddenly checked by want of funds ; and then we 
read, that " as soon as he left off keeping his table his 
friends forsook him : whenever they saw him they 
avoided him, and if by chance he met any of them, 
and went to stop them, they always excused them- 
selves on some pretence or other." A Social Essayist 
is satirical upon the once popular picturesque illustra- 
tion in story-books of some easy, careless, amiable 
spendthrift, who, after lavishing his fortune upon so- 
called friends, was, in the evil hour, deserted by them. 
Now, friends, it is objected, are not the sort of people 
men do lavish fortunes upon : the spendthrift wished 
to make a figure or enjoy himself, and collected about 
him whoever would further this end ; but it was really 
the fault of the spender, not of the world, that he 
should drop through after his money was gone. " The 
assumption was preposterous that, after his own means 
were wasted, his acquaintance should make all straight 
by giving him theirs — which was the moral apparently 
pressed on our raw and perplexed judgment." What ! 
shall we not resort to our friends in time of need ? is a 
query of exclamation put by Bishop Latimer in one of 
his sermons ; and he answers it by another : " And trow 
ye we shall not find them asleep?* Yes, I warrant you; 
and when we need their help most, we shall not have 



* In reference to Gethsemane. 






FRIENDSHIP THAT TURNS TO ACQUAINTANCE. 1S9 

it" Friendship in ill-luck turns to mere acquaintance: 
the wine of life, as a modern moralist puts it, goes into 
tr ; and folks that hugged the bottle shirk the 
cruet. 

" Tov? (p[\ovs 

*Eu to7? tea/cms xpij rol? (piXmaiv •JotyeXf'iv. 
"Oral/ 5' 6 dalfxoov ev dibSi, ri XP 7 ) (pi\<ov; 

# # • • • 

*Ovopa yup, epyov §' ovk convents oi (pi\oi 
01 u/) Vi raicri avpepopcus of res ^u'Xot.* 

Chaucer's version of the Romaunt of the Rose is but a 
variation of the old-world theme : the profes- 
of fair-weather friends are all falsehood and guile, 
his warning runs, to the credulous and deluded, — 

"As they shal aftirward sc, 
Whanne they arn falle in poverte, 
And ben of good and catelle bare ; 
Thanne shulde they sene who freendis ware. 

For of an hundred ccrteynly, 
Nor of a thousand fulle scarsly, 
Nc shal they fynde unnethis oon, 
Whanne poverte is cemen upon." 

»roke in mature age described himself as hav- 

apt in early lifef to confound his acquaintance 

.\m\ his friends together,— never doubting that he had a 

nuim : of the latter. He expected, if ever he 

1 fall into misfortune, to have as many and as 

i :es of friendship to produce as the 

ian in one of Lucian's dialogues draws from his 

Into these misfortune- he had fallen. And 

with this recorded result: "The fire of my adversity has 

of my acquaintance ; and, the separa- 

iripid. ( Jrcstes, 454, 455. 1 

of life when there is halm in the blood, ami that 
nd which the innocencj of our own he. ut 

broke 
[arch 17, 1719. 



190 FAIR-WEATHER FRIENDS. 

tion made, I discover on one side a handful of friends, 
but on the other a legion of enemies, at least of 
strangers." Some three or four years later that noble 
lord harps on the same string, and moralizes at his best 
on the effect of many misfortunes in making a nice 
discrimination between his acquaintance and his friends, 
such as we have seldom sagacity enough to make for 
ourselves : those insects of various hues, which used to 
hum and buzz about him while he stood in the sunshine, 
had disappeared since he had lived in the shade. Gay's 
fable addressed " To a Modern Politician " might reach 
the address of more than one or two of that time, if not 
of all times : 

" Stripped of your treasures, power, and place, . . . 
Where are your slaves, your flattering host ? 
What tongues now feed you with applause ? 
Where are the champions of your cause ? 
Now e'en that very fawning train 
Which shared the gleanings of your gain, 
Press foremost who shall first accuse 
Your selfish jobs, your narrow views," etc. 

What friends were made ? A hireling herd, for tem- 
porary votes preferred. Men shut their doors against a 
setting sun, is a pregnant saying of the cynic Ape- 
mantus. " I should fear those that dance before me 
now," as in the halls of Timon of Athens, "would one 
day stamp upon me." As pregnant is the saying of the 
Fool in King Lear: Let go thy hold when a great 
wheel runs down a hill, lest it break thy neck with fol- 
lowing it ; but the great one that goes up the hill, let 
him draw thee after. " Sir, sir," quoth bluff Enobarbus 
to fallen or falling Antony, " Thou'rt so leaky, that we 
must leave thee to thy sinking, for thy dearest quit 
thee." It is by no means strange, in the philosophy of 
the Player King in Hamlet, that our loves should with 
our fortunes change, 



A FALLEN MAX'S FALLLXG-A WA V FRIEXDS. 191 

" For 'tis a question left us yet to prove, 
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love. 
The great man down, you mark, his favourite flies ; 
The poor advanced makes friends of enemies. 
And hitherto doth love on fortune tend ; 
For who not needs, shall never lack a friend ; 
And who in want a hollow friend doth try, 
Directly seasons him his enemy." 

The fifth act of Jonson's tragedy of Sejanus is through- 
out in keeping with the exclamation of Arruntius, when 
the Emperor's letter is being read, and the senators are 
shifting their seats further and further off, " Gods ! how 
the leaves drop off, this little wind!" Has the falling 
man no friends here ? All is hushed. " Where now are 
all the hails and exclamations ? — 

" He that this morn rose proudly, as the sun, 
And, breaking through a mist of clients' breath, 
Came on, as gazed at and admired as he, 
When superstitious Moors salute his light, 
. . This man to fall ! fall? ay, without a look 
That durst appear his friend, or lend so much 
Of vain relief, to his changed state, as pity !" 

They that, before, like gnats, played in his beams, and 
thronged to circumscribe him, now not seen, nor deign 
to hold a common seat with him. Le monde i says a 
French naturalist, aime a rabaisscr et d cUnigrer tout ce 
qui a brille. Prescott tells how in the hour of Alma 
fallen fortunes, enemies stalled up, "like the base rep- 
into light amidst the ruins of some noble 
edifio ne of them men who had been "grateful" 

ients of his bounty — in the sense of gratitud 

me. The Kai r I [< my [V. forms an im 
I icturc as we see him cros ing the Alps with 
lithful Bertha and their infant child, but withoul 
>urtiers who had so lately thronged his 
be the companion of his toil and dangei 
The historian of the Italian Republics tells us of Lo 



192 OUT OF FORTUNE, OUT OF FRIENDS. 

renzo de' Medici, when his situation became critical, in 
1479, that "the people, whose attachment was founded 
on his prodigality and his public entertainments, showed, 
when his prosperity declined, that they were ready to 
abandon him." When Columbus in Hispaniola was 
looked upon as a declining man (1495), and Aguado 
hailed as the lord of the ascendant, " every dastard spi- 
rit " hastened to asperse the former, and thereby curry 
favour with the latter ; worship the rising sun, and shut 
his door against the setting one. So was it with the 
veteran admiral at court, two years later. Looked upon 
as a man declining in popularity, Columbus was by the 
baser sort treated with slight and supercilious scorn. 
In 1500, again, when he and his brothers were shipped 
home in chains, every base spirit which had been awed 
into obsequiousness by them while in power, now 
started up to insult and slander them. " Horns were 
blown in the neighbourhood of their prison [in San 
Domingo], to taunt them with the exultings of the 
rabble." The fate of the governor, Bobadilla, when 
ousted from his post in 1502, supplies the biographer 
of Columbus with a reflection to the purpose ; the 
emptiness of mere official rank, when unsustained by 
merit, was signally manifest in his case : the moment 
his authority in the island was at an end, his import- 
ance vanished ; and he found himself a solitary and 
neglected man, deserted by those whom he had most 
favoured. It is the way of the world. Charles Wes- 
ley's experiences in the same latitude afford a homely 
illustration of it. His journal, written in America at 
the time of his misunderstanding with Mr. Oglethorpe, 
records his sense of being " abused and slighted into an 
opinion of" his own " inconsiderableness. I could not," 
he goes on to say, " more be trampled upon were I a 
fallen minister of state. The people have found out 



DROPPIXG AX ACQUAINTANCE. 193 

that I am in disgrace ; my few well-wishers are afraid 
to speak to me : some have turned out of the way to 
avoid me ; others have desired that I would not take it 
ill if they seemed not to know me when we should 
meet. The servant that used to wash my linen, sent 
it back unwashed." Mos est oblivisci Jiominibus, ncque 
novisse, cujus niJiili sit faciunda gratia, says Plautus ; 
and that is a fashion, mos, that is never out of fashion. 
When old Madame de Bernstein ceased to patronize 
Harry Warrington, and took no pains to hide her 
change of countenance, her sen-ants, Mr. Thackeray 
makes a point of mentioning, "who used to treat him 
with such eager respect, scarcely paid him now any 
attention. My lady was often indisposed or engaged 
when he called upon her ; her people did not press him 
to wait ; did not volunteer to ask him whether he would 
nd dine, as they used in the days when he was the 
Fortunate Youth and companion of the wealthy and 
As a matter of course, the Macaronis and fine 
gentlemen at White's and Arthur's showed poor Harry 
Warrington such a very cold shoulder, that he sought 
their society less and less. Ovid will help us to yet 
her quotation on a theme so familiar to his pen : 

" Vix duo trcsve mihi de tot supcrcstis, amici. 
Csetcra Fortune, non mca turba, fuit." 

The man in power, it has been said, is never alone. 
But let him tumble from his place; and then, " le soir 
mem . subitement, rudement, avec bru- 

tality le vide se fait autour de lui." A [solani with 
in : the good ship in which his hopes were 
ice among the breakers, he hurries to pre- 
light — 
the free bird from the hospitable twig 

Where it had 1 flies "it" from I 

That i- an ominous entry in Swift's Journal to Stella, 



194 

bearing date Dec. 30, 1711 : " The Duke of Marlborough 
was at court to-day, and nobody hardly took notice of 
him." The Mashams were coming in, and the Marl- 
boroughs were going out. The greatest genius among 
Swift's friends and contemporaries, and more than even 
his equal in satire, propounds as a safe doctrine for 
satirists at large, that 

" if satire knows its time and place, 

You still may lash the greatest — in disgrace : 
For merit will by turns forsake them all ; 
Would you know when ? exactly when they fall." 

Says a Person of Quality in one of Mr. Browning's 

plays — 

" Do I not know, if courtiers prove remiss, 
There is a cause ? Of last year's fervid throng 
Scarce one-half comes now ! 

Sab. [Aside.] One-half ? No, alas ! 

The D. So can the mere suspicion of a cloud 
Over my fortunes strike each loyal heart." 

Amusing as edifying is the story M. Villemain tells, 
in his Memoir of Chateaubriand,* of Daru's interview 
with the Emperor while the draft of the new Academi- 
cian's speech was under consideration. Napoleon, 
speaking loudly and angrily, apostrophized the absent 
author of the inaugural speech in a tone of menace and 
indignation, — " If you don't like France, sir, you may 
leave it. Go, sir ; we don't understand each other, and 
I am master here." Now the words thus addressed, in 
Daru's sole presence — to the obnoxious absentee, were 
well heard outside the presence-chamber by courtly 
waiters upon providence, the providence of his Imperial 
Majesty ; and naturally they were by them assumed to 
concern, not Chateaubriand, but Daru. So, when the 
Minister returned to the ante-chamber, he found that his 

* La Tribune Moderne, iere partie. 



DISA VOWED BY FRIEXDS. 195 

courtly friends stood aloof,* or seemed to have forgotten 
his existence. At last some courageous bystander, it 
entured to hint that the sentence of banishment 
had been overheard, and it was unnecessary to explain 
that friendship could maintain no contest against loyalty. 
Daru, bursting into a laugh, reported the true meaning 
of the scene;" and there is perhaps nothing unreason- 
able in the surmise that the assembled courtiers joined in 
the merriment without a suspicion of their abject degra- 
dation. A day came when the Emperor himself was to 
taste the bitterness of forsaken because fallen power. 
Caulaincourt describes the deserted galleries and saloons 
ntainebleau in April 1S14: the marshals had van- 
ished, the brilliant staff of each marshal had vanished 
him, and the glittering crowd had dispersed ; there 
instead, a solitude that chilled the heart ; "the re- 
doubtable chief who so lately had never moved except 
surrounded by a magnificent cortege," was now disin- 
herited of the care and interest even of his friends. No 
sooner was Kutusoff out of favour at court, than the 
courtiers, "observant of the least cloud which over- 
shadows the fortunes of a leading character," shunned 
•ciety, — and this in so marked a way that " the 
iour of Russia" received with tears of gratitude 
of Count Oginski, a Polish nobleman, who, 
ig formerly been intimate with him in Lithuania, 
.-hearted en ltinue his 

ity. A cynical Turkish maxim gives 

>mall folks with great, there arc the subalterns in 
. upon whom the scoldir. f the com- 

\% officer to one of his juniors i-, decisive in its dam 
i the latter. "All v» !, all who I 

nion or judgment of their own, follow that of the 
lly shrunk from the intimacy of a ; . wh >, 

lilty of the crime of not p] 



196 THE REPUTATION TO BE GAINED 

counsel to " caress the favourites, avoid the unfortunate, 
and trust nobody." The not uncommon sight, in India, 
of a cloud of crows pecking a sick vulture to death, is 
taken by Macaulay as no bad type of what happens in 
this country, as often as fortune deserts one who has been 
great and dreaded : in an instant, all the sycophants 
who had lately been ready to lie for him, to forge for 
him, to pander for him, to poison for him, hasten to 
purchase the favour of his victorious enemies by accusing 
him. Massinger's Sir Giles Overreach is unblushingly 
a professor of the like practical philosophy ; thus he ex- 
pounds it to Wellborn : — 

" We worldly men, when we see friends and kinsmen 
Past hope, sunk in their fortunes, lend no hand 
To lift them up, but rather set our feet 
Upon their heads, to press them to the bottom." 

The diction may recall Ovid's fine comparison of a man 
of broken fortunes to a falling column, which, the lower 
it sinks, the greater weight it is obliged to sustain. 



XVIII. 

IMPOSING SILENCE AND INCONTINENT 
CHATTER. 

Proverbs xvii. 28.* 

IMPOSING in more senses than one is the cautious 
silence of the simpleton. It is an imposition upon 
the company, and he is an impostor, in so far as the com- 
pany give him credit for reticent wisdom. For "even a 
fool when he holdeth his peace is counted wise ; and he 
that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understand 



* In the First Series of Secular Annotations on Scripture Texts, 
pp. 70-76, under the title of " The Discreet Silence of Folly," ma; 
be found a previous chapter of instances and illustrations of this text. 



i 



BY SIMPLY HOLDIXG OX£'S TONGUE. 197 

exposition of speech, the imposition would 
end. Exposing himself, he would no longer impose 
upon thenx But, while sagely silent, he is accounted 

,:it sage. Shrewd enough to hold his tongue, his 
politic taciturnity is imposing ; and wisdom is imputed 
to him, and happy man is his dole. 

- though he be, he is in this one regard not u like 
to horse and mule, which have no understanding, whose 
mouths must be held with bit and bridle." At least he 
has just understanding enough to put on a curb for him- 
[ j apply his own bit to his own mouth, and to keep 
it there, and find himself the better for the gag. 

It has been safely enough alleged that, of two men 

equally successful in the business of life, the man who 

:it will be generally deemed to have more in him 

than the man who talks : the latter " shows his hand ; " 

;act length of his tether ; he 
j himself out so often that all his points and 
are matters of notoriety. But of the taciturn 
man little or nothing is known. Omtte ignotm . 
The shallow murmur, but the dec; 
dumb." Friends and acquaintance shake their heads 
1 exclaim with an air of authority that 
1 great deal more in him than p 
are as often wro: ,lit ; but what 

the silent man ? He can su 

he likes, by the simple pro- 

The mure a man, desirous 

. value above his worth, the Cax- 

itra.^t by dignified silence the 

rivial minds, the mure the world will 

r the wealth which he does not r> 

«»f the I , illustrations, — when 

. dumb strong-box with its lid braced d 



198 IGNORANCE OF BLOCKHEADS 

by iron clasps, and secured by a jealous padlock, in- 
voluntarily we suppose that its contents must be in- 
finitely more precious than the gauds and nicknacks 
which are unguardedly scattered about a lady's drawing- 
room. " Who could believe that a box so rigidly locked 
had nothing in it but odds and ends, which would be 
just as safe in a bandbox ?" A dissertator on Humbugs 
admits into the category the man who is cunning enough 
to get himself rated above his real deserts, but whose 
attitude, so far from being aggressive or insidious, is 
one of pure self-defence — the man who, conscious of 
possessing not a tithe of the ability with which he is 
credited, passes his life in the constant endeavour to 
maintain the imposture — who, having a secret to keep, 
by the instinct of self-preservation keeps it, that secret 
being his own emptiness ; that once oozing out, he is 
lost. There is a reputed wiseacre in one of Balzac's 
tales, who, whenever conversation turned on matters of 
science or history, made a point of becoming judiciously 
reticent and imposingly grave, and confined his part 
in the performance to little affirmative nods or negative 
movements of the head, comme un homme profond y and 
so saved his character. Tact and experience and know- 
ledge of the world may go far in aid of intellectual 
deficiencies, and even turn out sometimes " a very 
respectable counterfeit of a clever man ; " if they 
cannot supply brains, they can and often do prevent the 
lack of them appearing ; if they cannot make a fool 
wise, they will keep him from a thousand foolish words 
and actions. An intelligent simper may significantly 
tell of caution and an habitual abstinence from making 
foolish remarks, and thus indicates " a fertility of re- 
source in concealing ignorance." The blockhead also, 
who is ambitious, and who has no talent, finds some- 
times, quoth Mr. Carlyle, in the " talent of silence ] 



DISCREETLY VEILED BY SILENCE. 199 

a kind succedaneum. Sir Loftus Prettyman in the 
play, assuring Hanvood that men of fashion are spar- 
f their words, for various reasons, one being that 
inferior people are apt to forget themselves, and despise 
what is too familiar, is answered, " Don't take so much 
pains to make me comprehend that the more fools 
: the more people will despise them ; I never had 
a clearer conviction of it in my life." To Jaques' 
maxim, " Tis good to be sad, and say nothing," Rosalind 
replies, " Why, then, 'tis good to be a post." Even a post 
could almost be got to say Hum, like the mendicant friar 
who, his quality as yet unknown, thereby passed for wise 
with Moliere and Chapelle, when the two wits were 
disputing in a ferryboat on the atomic philosophy, and 
who, whenever either of them appealed to him for his 
judgment on the controverted points, " lachait de temps 
en temps un hum ! " in the tone of a man who says 
much less than he thinks, so that the controver- 
sialists awaited his decision with respect. But when 
he finally made off for shore with his wallet, and was 
>e nothing but a moine mendiant, the illusion 
:lled. Meanwhile, " son hum / discret et lache 
a pro] ut fait juger capable." Moliere turned 

who, then a child, was one of the passengers, 
e there now, my boy, what silence can 
ien it is properly kept." That man of (cw words, 
Day, in Under the Greenwood Tree % is thus 
-praised by his neighbours: "Silent? ah, 
silent! That man's silence is wonderful to listen 
y moment of it is brimming over with sound 
ling." Comprehensive talkers are apt to be 
me when we are not athirst for information ; but, 
fair, as Eliot puts it, we must admit 

uperior reticence is a good deal due to the lack 
of matter. "Speech is often barren; but silence does 



200 POLITIC TACITURNITY. 

not necessarily brood over a full nest." And then, 
working out that figure, your still fowl, it is added, 
blinking at you without remark, may all the while be 
sitting on one addled nest-egg ; and when it takes to 
cackling, will have nothing to announce but that addled 
delusion. 

Count Grammont's portrait of the Earl of Oxford of 
his time, one of the first peers of the realm, is that of 
a very handsome man, and " of the Order of the Garter, 
which greatly adds to an air naturally noble. In short, 
from his outward appearance you would suppose he 
was possessed of some sense ; but as soon as you hear 
him speak you are perfectly convinced to the contrary." 
Mr. Rushworth, in Miss Austen's Mansfield Park, se- 
cures the good word of Sir Thomas Bertram by his 
judicious reticence ; and we are told how " by looking, 
as he really felt, most exceedingly pleased with Sir 
Thomas's good opinion, and saying scarcely anything, 
he did his best towards preserving that good opinion 
a little longer." The lips of a fool will swallow up 
himself — or, as a commentator expresses it, he is the 
sepulchre of his own reputation ; for as long at he was 
silent, you were willing to give him credit for the usual 
share of intelligence, but no sooner does he blurt out 
some astounding blunder — no sooner does he begin to 
prattle forth his egotism and vanity, than your respect 
is exchanged for contempt or compassion. Jeremy 
Taylor says of the ineloquent man that holds his tongue, 
that by so doing he shall be sure not to be troublesome 
to the company, nor become tedious with multiplicity of 
idle talk: "he shall be presumed wise, and oftentimes 
is so." It is of the affectedly grave that Fuller says, 
they do wisely to counterfeit a reservedness, and to keep 
their chests always locked — not for fear any should 
steal treasure thence, but lest some should look in and 



INCONTINENT CHATTER. 201 

see that there is nothing in them. Some by their faces, 
he elsewhere remarks, ma)' pass current enough till they 
cry themselves down by their speaking, " for men know 
the bell is cracked when they hear it tolled." It tolls 
the knell of their reputation for wisdom ; and a knell 
by cracked metal is a sorry sound, that no-way tends to 
dignify the departed. 

Many are the irrepressible cacklers who, having really 
nothing to say, will — not say it. On the contrary, they 
>w with rapid small talk, infinitesimally small, less 
than nothing, though made up of nothings. Incontinent 
of chatter, they are afflicted and afflict others with a 
very diarrhoea of words, words, words. On parte souvent 
sans avoir rien a dire, says Voltaire in one of his epi- 
grams. There is a time to keep silence, and a time to 
, the Wise King warns us; but unwise gabblers 
: to take the warning. The time to speak they 
know well ; and it is in season and out of season. When 
that wordy swaggerer Pistol i.^ being thrust down- 
, " If he do nothing but speak nothing, he shall be 
nothing here," Falstaff " As a mail would say in 

a word of two syllables, nothing," quoth Hen Jonson. 
Epicharmus describes a certain prater as the reverse of 
clever at talking, yet unable to hold his tongue : ov 
i. ar/av aciWrov. Cato took pride in 
ring the reproach of being systematically silent, 
by the promise that he would be found quite ready to 
when he should have something I Apropos 

of habitually silent people, Montesquieu, in th 
Letter^, refers to an opposite ( tar more singular 

is taciturnes, and gifted with a really extra- 
try talent; those, namely, who are able to talk 
without having anything whatever to ' sont C€UX 

rler sans rien due Coleridge deemed it 



202 IRREPRESSIBLE CHATTERERS. 

characteristic of the Roman dignity and sobriety, that, 
in the Latin, "to favour with the tongue," favere lingua, 
means, to be silent ; whereas we English say, " Hold 
your tongue !" as if it were an injunction that could only 
be carried into effect by manual force, or the pincers of 
the forefinger and thumb. " It is not women and French- 
men only that would rather have their tongues bitten 
than bitted, and feel their souls in a strait-waistcoat, 
when they are obliged to remain silent." Calm silence 
when there is nothing to be said, Mr. Charles Reade 
calls a "sure proof of intelligence." Macaulay is severe 
on Goldsmith's lack of self-command to hold his tongue, 
albeit painfully sensible of his inferiority in conversation, 
and feeling every failure keenly : his animal spirits and 
vanity were always impelling him to try to do the one 
thing which he could not do. Boswell once observed of 
him, that he had a great deal of gold in his cabinet, but, 
not content with that, was always taking out his purse. 
" Yes, Sir," Johnson assented, " and that so often an 
empty purse." Good things he could say, and did say, 
sometimes, very good things ; but his foible for affecting 
airy facility in badinage and smartness exposed him to 
sneers as one of the irrepressibles who can 

" Never hold their tongue a minute, 
While all they say has nothing in it." 
Swift remarks, that the chameleon, who is said to feed 
upon nothing but air, has of all animals the nimblest 
tongue. In Gay's Fables — 

"An Ant there was, whose forward prate 

Controlled all matters in debate ; 

Whether he knew the thing or no, 

His tongue eternally would go, 

For he had impudence at will," etc. 

" Voild le principe de tonte impertinence" exclaims La 
Bruyere, " de n y avoir pas assez d' esprit pour bien parler, ni 
assez de jugement pour se taire? Speak not at all, in any 



MEANINGLESS BABBLE. 203 

wise, till you have somewhat to speak, is one of the 
golden rules enforced by Mr. Carlyle, who reckons 
among the most indisputable malefactors omitted, or 
inserted, in the Criminal Calendar, the chatterer who 
" babbles he knows not what, and has clapped no bridle 
on his tongue, but lets it run racket, ejecting chatter and 
futility." The candid judge, says he elsewhere, will, in 
general, require that a speaker, " in so extremely serious 
a Universe as this of ours," have something to speak 
about. And again, in another place : " No mortal has 
a right to wag his tongue without saying something : he 
knows not what mischief he does, past computation ; 
scattering words without meaning." When Lady Sarah, 
in one of Joanna Baillie's comedies, after verbosely 
haranguing and lecturing Miss Seabright, pauses one 
instant for a reply, and then complains, " You don't 
answer me," — " Indeed, ma'am, I had better not," says 
the damsel, " for I don't know what to say." 

V 6". — You arc a very prudent young lady, indeed, to make 
that a reason for holding your tongue. 

'hia. — It is a reason, indeed, which elder ladies do not al- 
ways attend to."' 

teller of the story of Cousin Phillis, contrasting 
md present in her rustic home, lays stress on the 
fact that until now whatever he had heard spoken in 
that happy household were simple words of true mean- 
if they had aught to say, they said it ; and if any- 
one preferred silence, nay if all did so, there were no 
modic efforts to talk for the sake of talking. When 
'!<>, in The Honeymoon, compares a chattering 
lie to a watermill, he corrects himself, and 
Withdraws the simile, because a mill, to give it motion, 

>w, whether sh< >r no, 

man's tongue will . 



204 INTERMINABLE TALKERS 

Bishop Butler, in his sermon on the government of the 
tongue, laments that incontinent chatterers, " as they 
cannot for ever go on talking of nothing," will go on 
from bad to worse, from mere negation to positive mis- 
chief, in the way of scandal and defamation of character, 
" divulging of secrets, their own secrets as well as those 
of others, anything rather than be silent." One occasion 
of silence, therefore, the good prelate takes to be ob- 
vious : namely, when a man has nothing to say, or 
nothing but what is better unsaid. Tobacco-smoke is 
panegyrized by Smelfungus as the one element in which, 
by our European manners, men can sit silent together 
without embarrassment, and where no man is bound to 
speak one word more than he has actually and veritably 
got to say. " Nay, rather every man is admonished and 
enjoined by the laws of honour, and even of personal 
ease, to stop short of that point ; at all events, to hold 
his peace and take to his pipe again, the instant he has 
spoken his meaning, if he chance to have any." Boileau 
in one of his satires exposes the wordy folk " qui, par- 
lant beaucoup, ne disent jamais rien"; and in another 
condescends to such small deer as 

" Celle qui de son chat fait son seul entretien, 
Celle qui toujours parle et ne dit jamais rien." 

Mrs. Wilson, in Wildfell Hall, is described repeating 
her oft-repeated trivialities, " uttered apparently for the 
sole purpose of denying a moment's rest to her inex- 
haustible organs of speech." Is it that people think it a 
duty to be always talking ? muses Mrs. Graham in the 
same book, — " and so never pause to think, but fill up 
with aimless trifles and vain repetitions when subjects 
of real interest fail to present themselves ? or do they 
really take a pleasure in such discourse ?" The author 
of Essays on Social Subjects accepts as very true the 
allegation that we often have to talk for mere talking's 



WITH XOTHIXG TO SAY. 205 

sake, and scouts as "impracticable nonsense" what philo- 
sophers have advised about never opening our mouths 
unless we have something to say ; but none the more 
arc those people spared who throw themselves into the 
situation with a spurious, unnatural relish, and use it as 
a sort of practice-ground for their powers. An alas ! is 
towed both on those who talk and us that hear, if the 
said talkers ever come to value themselves upon this 
factitious vivacity, and keep it up deliberately for our 
entertainment after their own is spent. Like those in 
Churchill — 

"Who, to be silent always loth, 
Would speak on either side, or both ;" 

but unlike them in this alleged characteristic, 

" That orators professed, 'tis known, 
Talk not for our sake, but their own." 

: people, it has been said, must in the course of 
their lives have admired and envied the graceful facility 
with which what may be termed the Irish style of con- 
n is kept up ; though, when we come to examine 
the talk, it is found to be based on saying everything 
that comes into the mind, and on revealing the smallest 
personal history. 

tter than such discourse doth silence loi 
Long, barren .silence, square with my d 

worth, and says well. Mr. Carson, in the 

. is represented as one of those persons 
m to think it a social duty never to allow of a 
lent's truce from talk : we see and hear him labour- 
it what he considers his vocation, the 
vention of an interval of silence in any spot of earth 
n possibly make himself heard. Nothing in 
imon have the like of him with La Hruyei'e's hontme du 
trie /Y//, whenever substantial matter 



206 NOTHING TO SAY, SAID AT FULL LENGTH. 

fails him, or he is palpably and self-perceptibly not in 
the vein. " Chante-t-on avec un rhume ? Ne faut-il 
pas attendre que la voix revienne ?" Cato declares that 
man to approach nearest to a god who knows when and 
how to be silent : Proximus Me Deo est qui scit ratione 
tacere. Most undivine accordingly is the fatal facility of 
that gift of the gab which is satirized in the "politician" 
in Hudibras : — 

" But still his tongue ran on, the less 
Of weight it bore, with greater ease ; 
And with its everlasting clack 
Set all men's ears upon the rack." 

The editor of the Biglow Papers makes the discovery 
that " nothing" takes longer in the saying than anything 
else, for, as ex nihilo nihil fit, so from one polypus nothing 
any number of similar ones' may be produced. Mrs. 
Allen, in Northanger Abbey, is admirably sketched as a 
person whose vacancy of mind and incapacity for think- 
ing were such, that, as she never talked a great deal, so 
she could never be entirely silent ; and therefore, while 
she sat at her work, if she lost her needle, or broke her 
thread, if she heard a carriage in the street, or saw a 
speck upon her gown, she must observe it aloud, and 
make a subject of \X.,faute de mieux. Much brighter and 
brisker spirits than hers are all too many who cultivate 
" that sweetest art, to talk all day ; be eloquent — and 
nothing say," as some one has tersely Englished the 
Italian. 

" E quella soavissima 

Arte tanto eloquente 
Che sa si longo spazio 

Parlar, senza dir niente." 



XIX. 
AXS WERED UNHEARD. 

Proverbs xviii. 13. 

TO give a reply before the question has been fully 
heard, implies some deficiency in either good 
manners or good sense, or both. " He that answereth 
a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame 
unto him." And if this be true in private discourse, 
when from eagerness to appear gifted with superlative 
of ready insight, penetrating sagacity, and 
intuitive mastery of a subject, or of all subjects, an 
impatient debater or controversialist interrupts his in- 
utor, and makes short work of his argument 
part-heard, and ignores all that was yet to come ; much 
it, in Bishop Patrick's words, " a shame to a 
trate, if, in matters of justice and judgment, he 
a resolution, before he hath taken full cogni- 
\ of them." Nicodemus did well to start the season- 
able query, " Doth our law judge any man before it hear 
and know what he docth?" Festus did well to 
t that it was not the manner of the Romans to 
man to die, before that he which was ac- 
cusers face to face, and had licence to 
;• for himself concerning the charge laid against 
him. And in the same spirit, and by the same rule, 
. had Felix done well to i\lU-v hearing 
P defence until Paul' present : " 1 

will h " when thine 

He that is first in his own cause seemethjust, 

h< r of the proverb >lomon ; but his 

meth and searcheth him. Audire alteram 



20$ HEARING BOTH SIDES. 

partem, is a first duty in judicial inquiries, and indeed in 
every-day life. 

True that, as one of Mr. Trollope's doctors objects, if 
in this world we suspend our judgment till we've heard 
all that can be said on both sides of every question, we 
should never come to any judgment at all. Poor Lord 
Polkemmet, of the Scottish bench, was heard to say, 
" Weel, Maister Askine, I heard you, and I thocht ye 
were richt ; and I heard you, Dauvid (David Cathcart), 
and I thocht ye were richt; and now I hae heard Maister 
Clerk, and I think he is the richtest amang ye. That 
bathers me, ye see ; sae I maun tak hame the process, 
and wamble it in my wame a wee " — a pet phrase, it 
would seem, of this ingenious and ingenuous lord of 
session. It was pre-eminently characteristic of Da- 
guesseau, that he habitually collected, collated, examined, 
weighed, and compared en tout les raisons des deux par- 
ties ; and with such art and precision was this effected, 
that nothing on either side was overlooked, and that no 
one among the numerous listeners in court could predict 
what the avis of the avocat-general would be, until he 
drew to a conclusion. Benvenuto Cellini is all admi- 
ration for the king's lieutenant in civil affairs before 
whom he had to plead in the great hall of the Palais at 
Paris, — the counsellors sometimes speaking all together : 
" To my great surprise this extraordinary magistrate, 
with the true countenance of a Pluto, seemed by his 
attitude to listen now to one, now to another, and con- 
stantly answered with the utmost propriety ; and as I 
always took great pleasure in contemplating the efforts 
of genius, of what nature soever, this appeared to me 
so wonderful that I would not have missed seeing it for 
any consideration." Lord Skindeep in the comedy, 
when told that if he be not quick he will not hear a 
word of the debate, replies airily, " All the better ; for as 



POLITICAL OXESIDEDXESS. 

we have made up our opinion on the question, nob. 

we're prejudiced by the arguments of either 
party/' In contrast with this practical philosophy of an 
imaginary peer, take the avowal of an actual and exem- 
plary member of the other House, Francis Horner, who 
ccasion of a great debate and division on the 
Corn Laws, in 1S15, stated that he had "come down to 
;se with a sincere desire of hearing the question 
fully discussed ; for, however strong might be his own 
inions, he thought it due to the importance of the 
subject to hear the opinions of all who had considered it, 
and to ascertain the various modes in which the evidence 
adduced had struck various minds." Few public men, 
it has been said, can wait to take up a definite position 
in party politics till they have thoroughly mastered and 
impartially weighed all sides of the great questions with 
have to deal : in public affairs, action is an 
•icd requisite to a complete understanding of them ; 
ly by being involved in them that you can 

1 them ; nor is it until you hear views dia- 

pposed to those you have inherited, set forth 

opponent of obviously superior powers, and of 

t sincerity of conviction, that you see how much 

\\ and for the other side. The lad of a 

ry turn, says Mr. Charles Kingsley, will read '1 

books, the hid of a Radical turn, Radical books ; and the 

les of party and prejudice will be deepened 

id of being thrown away for 

ar white g truth, which will show him rea 

I in all honest men." Candid 

by all means, hear the extreme 

pe- hat these say and think, whether 

. part of the facts 
.n we fully understand a controvi 
till we know how it look.^ to those who carry each 

1 



2io HEARING BOTH SIDES. 

to its extremest point, — though still less can we under- 
stand it till we know how it looks to those who stand 
between the two, and who see both sides of the shield 
instead of only one. All error, observed the late Samuel 
Bailey, is the consequence of narrow and partial views, 
and can be removed only by having a question presented 
in all its possible bearings, or, in other words, by un- 
limited discussion. According to Mr. Stuart Mill, it 
might be plausibly maintained that in almost every one 
of the leading controversies, past or present, in social 
philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they 
affirmed, though wrong in what they denied ; and that 
if either could have been made to take the other's views 
in addition to its own, little more would have been needed 
to make its doctrine correct. In his review of Grote's 
History of Greece he pays a special tribute of admiration 
to that habitual love of fair play, and of hearing both sides 
of a case, which was more or less a quality of the Greeks 
generally, but had so firm a hold on the Athenians that 
it did not desert them under the most passionate excite- 
ment. To their " multitudinous judicial tribunals the 
Athenians were indebted " for this. It is well said, that 
every man who knows anything of courts of justice 
knows how convincing the arguments on one side seem, 
even to indifferent persons, till something equally or 
more convincing is brought forward on the other side ; 
and a candid plaintiff or defendant will be perfectly 
astonished to find how much can be said against his own 
case which he never before thought of — enough com- 
monly, if not to upset his own case, yet fully to justify the 
adverse party in disputing it. Sententious Seneca passes 
sentence on the judge that will hear but one side : — 
" Si statuit aliquid, parte inaudita altera, 
^Equum licet statuerit, haud asquus est." 

Or, in old-fashioned English, Who judgment gives, an 






CONVICTED AXD COXDEMXED UNHEARD. 21 r 

will but one side hear, Is, though he judge right, no good 
:er. Aristides, they tell us, would lend but one ear 
to any one who accused an absent " party," and used to 
hold his hand on the other ; intimating, that he reserved 
an ear for the absentee accused. When Caleb Williams, 
accused and condemned unheard, exclaims, in reproach- 
ful appeal to " the object of all his reverence, whom he 
once ventured to call his mother," Can she wish not to 
hear him ? can she have no anxiety for his justification, 
whatever may be the unfavourable impression received 
st him ? her answer is, " Not an atom. I have 
neither wish nor inclination to hear you." And to his 
renewed remonstrance, Can she think of condemning a 
man, when she has heard only one side of his story ? the 
ier is instant : " Indeed I can. The maxim of 
ng both sides may be very well in some cases ; but 
aid be ridiculous to suppose that there are not 
other cases that, at the first mention, are too clear to 
admit the shadow of a doubt." Worthy of Robespierre 
the decree proposed by him to the Convention in 
and passed, the substantive law of which, as ex- 
Macaulay, was simply this, that whatever 
Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris (no longer content 
with forty, fifty, sixty heads in a morning) should think 
pernicious to the Republic, was a capital crime; while 
vidence was, that whatever satisfied the 
is sufficient proof; and the law of procedure 
that there should be an a<lv< - I ainst the 

ner, and no advocate for him ; and it was expi 
declared that, if the jurors were in any manner 

'. of the guilt of the prisoner, they might convict 

•ut hearii [\c witnc As every man in 

n itself felt the knife at his throat, there 

1 murmur at the proposed decree, and a motion for 

: but the intervention of Bart-re over 



212 HEARIXG BOTH SIDES. 

opposition ; and Barere, be it remembered, was the man 
whose voice had been the loudest in opposition to the 
beseeching friends of Danton, when they mustered 
courage to pray that the Convention would at least hear 
him in his own defence, before they sent him to certain 
death. 

Plutarch repeats what was told of Alexander in the 
first years of his reign, that when capital causes were 
brought before him, he used to stop one of his ears with 
his hand while the plaintiff was opening the indictment, 
that he might reserve it perfectly unprejudiced for 
hearing the defendant. But this is Aristides over again. 

The author of Hudibras puts this query among his 
Miscellaneous Thoughts : — 

11 What makes all subjects discontent 
Against a prince's government, 
And princes take as great offence 
At subjects' disobedience, 
That neither the other can abide, 
But too much reason on each side ?" 

The late Mr. Nassau Senior, in one of his dissertations 
on political philosophy, drew a contrast between an 
individual, who can generally be forced to hear both 
sides of the question, and a nation, which can not, and 
never does so voluntarily. It reads only its own state 
papers, he said, its own newspapers, and its own 
pamphlets ; it hears only its own speakers, accepts all 
their statements of facts and of laws, and holds itself to 
be obviously and notoriously right on every international 
contest. As to individuals, on the other hand, there are 
few disputes in which each party is not in some degree 
in the wrong, or in which he can avoid perceiving that 
he is so, if once he be compelled to give a deliberate 
attention to all his opponent's arguments. It was in 
reference to the never-explained, and now probably 



THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH-SEEKIXG. 213 

-to-be-explained mystery of the Byron separation, 
that Leigh Hunt said in his Autobiography how long 
he had been convinced, and every day strengthened the 
conviction, that no domestic dispute, even if it were 
.ble or proper to investigate it, can ever be 
thoroughly understood unless you hear both parties, 
and know their entire relative situations, together with 
the interests and passions of those about them. 

In entering upon any scientific pursuit, one of the 

student's first endeavours, as Sir John Herschell would 

impress upon him, should be to strengthen himself by 

•.hing of an effort and a resolve for the unprejudiced 

admission of any conclusion which shall appear to be 

supported by observation and argument, even if it should 

to notions he may have previously formed 

or taken up on the credit of ^others. " Such an effort is 

approach towards mental purity. It is the 

'euph I rue ' with which we must purge our sight 

ive and contemplate as they are the 

:ruth." The question, What is truth ? has 

inly, Mr. Lecky affirms, no prospect of obtaining a 

r; but the question, What is the spirit of 

ty, he thinks, be discussed with much greater 

,:-eement. By the spirit of truth, he means 

that : f mind in which men who acknowledge 

fallibility, and who desire above all thin 

-ikl adjudicate between con- 
sents; who con 
can be legitimately certain of the truth of what 
n taught till they have both examined 
nee and heard what can 

id Sydney Smith in his 
it, that we should not judge air. 
the repn f tl ■ alone, 

it hearing and reading what they 1: 



214 > HEARING BOTH SIDES. 

their own defence ; religious hatred (if there can be such 
a thing) is often founded on tradition, often on hearsay, 
often on the misrepresentations of notorious enemies ; 
without inquiry, without the slightest examination of 
opposite reasons and authorities, or consideration of that 
which the accused party has to offer for defence or expla- 
nation. " If charity be ever necessary, it is in those who 
know accurately neither the accusation nor the defence." 
Nor was the preacher ever slow to denounce, in other 
sermons, those who thus indulge more in the luxury of 
invective than in the labour of inquiry. In the case of 
any person whose judgment is really deserving of con- 
fidence, How has it become so ? asks Mr. Mill ; and the 
answer is, Because he has kept his mind open to criticism 
of his opinions and conduct ; because it has been his 
practice to listen to all that could be said against him ; 
because he has felt, that the only way in which a human 
being can make some approach to knowing the whole of 
a Subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by 
persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all 
modes in which it can be looked at by every character 
of mind. " The steady habit of correcting and com- 
pleting his own opinion by collating it with those of 
others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carry- 
ing it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a 
just reliance on it." Men may, as the Historian of 
Morals remarks of politics, study the debates of Parlia- 
ment under the influence of a strong party bias, and 
may even pay more attention to the statements of one 
party than to those of the other; but they never imagine 
that they can form an opinion by an exclusive study of 
what has been written on one side : — the two views of 
every question are placed in juxtaposition, and ever 
one who is interested in the subject examines both. 
Cicero, " the greatest orator, save one, of antiquity," 



WE RED UX HEARD. 



left it on record, as we are pertinently reminded in the 
that he always studied his adversary's 
case with as great intensity as his own, if not still greater. 
And what Cicero practised as the means of forensic 
.s the essayist urges, to be imitated by 
all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth. 
For he who knows only his own side of the case, is con- 
victed of knowing little of that : his reasons may be good, 
and no one may have been able to refute them ; but if he 
is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite 
side, if he does not so much as know what they are, what 
rial ground has he for preferring either opinion ? 

Before leaving the general subject of ** Ansv 
unheard," reference may be allowed, in passing, to a sort 
institutional or temperamental habit some people 
»f breaking in upon another speaker, before hear- 
ing him out, and on the assumption, complacent and 
xtory in them, provoking and often unjust to him, 
that they fully apprehend and comprehend his mean- 
.:id will spare him, therefore, the superfluous trouble 
of further enunciating it. They, in point of fact, dis- 
courteously, — however innocent of designed offence, — 
r the matter before they hear it, answer the man 
unheard. Tu qui Jem ex ore orationcm tnihi eripis 
are really taking the w< >rds out of my mouth. liut the 
ht entirely alter the «t The 

xal is sore against thai 
cut off everything that is said to them by 
they have half heard, and 

This auth 
irate, and knew the f the 

: partem. And such " ! 
crs" he pronounced "the most un 
the h to do with them the better. 



2 1 6 BROTHERS A T STRIFE. 

people, said Swift, will never learn anything, because 
they understand everything too soon. Their impatience 
is as perverse and as unprofitable as Hotspur's in 
Shakspeare : — 

" Before the game's afoot, thou wilt let slip." 



T 



XX. 

BROTHERS AT STRIFE. 
Proverbs xviii. 19. 

HE Book of Proverbs declares a brother offended 
to be harder to be won than a strong city ; " and 
their contentions are like the bars of a castle." It is 
evident by facts, observes a commentator on the pas- 
sage, that when bitter contentions are excited among 
brethren or near relations, their resentment becomes 
more implacable, and the consequences more terrible, 
than in quarrels among strangers : it is more difficult to 
conciliate their differences than to take a fortified city; 
and their stubborn minds resist all endeavours to bend 
them to a cordial reconciliation, with a resistance like 
that of the iron bars of a castle. 

Love and Hate are half-brothers in Spenser's allegory, 
" though of contrarie natures to each other," " both 
strongly arm'd, as fearing one another." In a later 
book of the Faerie Qucene we have " two comely 
squires " in conflict, brothers, and most unbrotherly, 
Bracidas and Amidas, " bending against themselves 
their cruel arms." Manuel and Caesar, the royal brothers 
in Schiller's fateful tragedy, Die Brant von Messina, 
cherish unmitigable deadly hate, that spurns all kin- 
dred ties, all youthful fond affections ; triumphant over 



BROTHERS AT STRIFE. 



nature's holiest bands, bursts forth that wild storm of 
brothers' hate. The mother that in vain has sought to 
reconcile them, foresees and foretells when her dim eye 
shall behold them, " foot to foot, close, like the Theban 
pair, with maddening gripe, and fold each other in a last 
embrace — each press with vengeful thrust the dagger 
home," — nor even then shall discord be appeased ; the 
very flame of their funeral pyre shall tower dissevered. 
Oliver and Orlando, \x\As You Like It, have their hands 
h other's throat, and keep them there despite old 
Adam's piteous appeal, " Sweet masters, be patient ; for 
your father's remembrance, be at accord ; " but in their 
bitter as the feud is, reconciliation ensues in a fifth 
act, nay, earlier, in a fourth; when the elder brother, 
harder to be won than a strong city, and, as the wrong- 
the more implacable of the two, by the rule of 
quern l&seris, is saved from the " sucked and 
by the younger, that found him sleep- 
id twice indeed turned his back, and proposed to 
: but kindness, in its best sense of kinship, — 

;t kindness, nobler ever than revenge, 
Made him give battle to the lion 

I there was reconciliation, and tears " most 
kindly bathed " their " recountments " each to each. No 
such turning-point in the strife of Edgar and Edmund 
in K r. None such in the fratricidal feud of 

I kville's tragedy, the oldi 

\tant. Tcuitii (St discord ia fratritw, s 
paints it at its blackest in the feud bet\ 

Livy and his like exemplify 

mulus and Remus. Gibbon i it in the 

"unnatural conte t " of Constant! ( nstantius, and 

Arguing that Lewis the Eleventh was not 

of the crime imputed to him, of havii 

brother the Duke of Guienne, Michelct 



218 CARACALLA AND GETA. 

speaks incidentally of that crime as exceedingly com- 
mon in that day. It would seem, he says, that 
fratricide, enrolled at this period in the Ottoman law, 
and ordained by Mahomet II., was in general use in 
the fifteenth century among Christian (even most 
Christian) princes. 

Hawthorne somewhere moralizes on those family 
feuds which render hatred the more deadly, by the 
dead and corrupted love that they intermingle with 
its native poison. 

Every dissension of man with man, according to Dr. 
Thomas Brown, excites in us a feeling of painful incon- 
gruity ; but we feel a peculiar " incongruity " in the 
discord of those whom one roof has sheltered in early 
life, and whose dust should, as Cicero puts it, be mingled 
under one common stone — sepulchra Jiabere communia. 
History is rife with specimens of this incongruity, more 
easily to be remembered than contrasted ones of the 
saving grace of congruity (as schoolmen talk). One' 
thinks of antagonistic brothers at all degrees of antag- 
onism — some cases being where the enmity, like the 
Irishman's reciprocity, is all on one side. There are 
Caracalla and Geta, for instance, sons of Severus, and 
joint emperors of Rome, — of whom the disappointed 
father foretold, in his anguish, that the weaker and 
milder of his sons would fall a sacrifice to the stronger 
and fiercer, who, in his turn, would be ruined by his own 
vices. The divided form of government prescribed by 
Severus would, in Gibbon's opinion, have proved a 
source of discord between the most affectionate 
brothers ; it was impossible that it could long subsist 
between two implacable enemies, who neither desired 
nor could trust a reconciliation. It was obvious that 
one only could reign, and that the other must fall ; and 
each of them, as the historian shows, judging of his 



RECORDS OF FRATRICIDE. 219 

rival's cjesigns by his own, guarded his life with the most 

[gilance from the repeated attacks of poison or 

the sword. " Their rapid journey through Gaul and 

Italy, during which they never ate at the same table or 

slept in the same house, displayed to the provinces the 

odious spectacle of fraternal discord." The emperors 

are described as meeting only in public, in the presence 

of their afflicted mother, and each surrounded by a 

numerous train of armed followers ; while, even on these 

occasions of ceremony, the dissimulation of courts could 

ill disguise the rancour of their hearts. If Severus too 

truly foretold the event, happier was he in dying first 

than had been Philip V. of Maccdon, in living to see 

Demetrius done to death by Perseus. Both Perseus and 

ilia are credited with a certain amount of remorse, 

but hardly of the nobler sort that afflicted Timolcon in 

t of his slaughtered elder brother, Timophanes. 

f fratricide dating from the firstborn of Adam, 

uprise mention of the sons of David ; of Aris- 

tobulu- and AntiVonus, whose blood mingled on the 

ment of the Temple; of Aristobuius and Alexander 

»d and his brother Joseph ; of Gunde- 

Burgundian, a triple fratricide for in succession 

:w his brothers Chilperic, Godemar, and Godesil, 

and t > credulous and compassionating Avitus, 

nne, he professed to be very sorry about 

>nd crimes, before he turned his hand 

ird ; and again, of Henry II. of Castile, who 

his brother Don Pedro with his own hand ; and of 

be, who put to death all three brothers, Miirad, 

I Shuja, after they had vainly ainst 

ntinually. The lit of broth< 
; . hard t<> be won, may be swell) d by the nana-, 
0fth< f Childcbcrt, William I., and of Henry II. 

the Cruel and his brothers would figure in il 



220 BROTHERS AT STRIFE. 

without the bloody stain of fratricide to blot the page. 
But it is not pleasing to offer a reader dark passages of 
fraternal hatred, as Lord Lytton finds occasion to re- 
mark by the mouth of one of his autobiographic heroes, 
who reminds his brother of Eteocles and Polynices, and 
of their very ashes refusing to mingle. " I know not," 
Devereux tells Gerald, " if our ashes will exhibit so laud- 
able an antipathy ; but I think our hearts and hands 
will do so while a spark of life animates them ; yes, 
though our blood," he adds, in a voice described as 
quivering with furious emotion, "prevents our contest 
by the sword, it prevents not the hatred and the curses 
of the heart/' — of which, accordingly, " our hero," a mere 
youngster, is lavish enough, and to spare. If he apolo- 
gizes in the sequel for detailing these ugly experiences, 
he does so on the plea that in the record of all passions 
there is a moral ; and that it is wise to see how vast a 
sum of units of childish animosity swell, when they are 
once brought into a heap by some violent event, and 
told over by the nice accuracy of revenge. A friend to 

whom Rogers once said, " Why, you and Mr. live 

like two brothers," replied with effusion, " God forbid ! " 
And the old poet was fain or free to own that most of 
the " misunderstandings " which one hears of, exist be- 
tween brothers and sisters. Mr. Thackeray represents 
the Baronet and his brother in Vanity Fair as having 
every reason which brothers possibly can have for being 
by the ears ; above all, these money transactions, specu- 
lations in life and death, silent battles for reversionary 
spoil, " make brothers very loving towards each other . 
as the world goes ; and he professes to have known a 
five-pound note interpose and knock up a half-century's 
attachment between two brethren. " The elder and 
younger son of the house of Crawley were, like the 
gentleman and lady in the weatherbox, never at home 



'ACER RIM A PROXIMORl'M ODIA* 221 

together — they hated each other cordially." It is bred 
in the bone, with some. It runs in the blood. And the 
running of bad blood in the veins may tend to the shed- 
ding of it too, — bad or good ; and brothers in blood may 
thus become bloody brothers — shedding like water what 
is thicker than water, or should be, according to all laws 
of affinity, set at nought however by those who, being SO 
close of kin, are yet so far from kind. 

Bosola tells Duke Ferdinand, when the brothers have 
compassed the death of their sister, the Duchess of 
Main — 

■' You have bloodily approved the ancient truth, 
That kindred commonly do worse agree 
Than remote strangers." 

rrima proximorutn odia t says Tacitus : the hatred 

of tho>e nearest of kin is the bitterest of all. One of 

hapters of Swift and Arbuthnot's History of Jolui 

Bull opens with a reference to the old observation, that 

quarrels of relations are harder to reconcile than 

ther injuries from friends, fret and gall more, and 

;>■ of them is not so easily obliterated. And 

tory is quoted, of the bird that was grieved 

mely at being wounded with an arrow feathered 

with his own wing, — and again of the oak, that let many 

Toan, when he was cleft with a wedge of his 

One of 1 hitler's satires lias a picture of 

" twin ind-hearted," who 

»ne, 
et upon, 
I like broth I brother, 

I put to tlf sword b) ->n- anol 

y last chapter of Gibboi I work', in re- 

tic quarrels of the Romans, and how. 



222 BORDERERS' ENMITIES. 

after the death of Nicholas the Fourth, Rome was aban- 
doned for six months to the fury of civil war, describes 
the work of destruction as consummated by the blind 
and thoughtless vengeance of factions ; and then we 
read, — the italics being the historian's very own, — "In 
comparing the days of foreign, with the ages of domestic 
hostility, we must pronounce that the latter have been 
far more ruinous to the city." And Petrarch is quoted 
to the purpose, where he tells Rome, in his CarminA 
Latina, that no Barbarian can boast the merit of that 
stupendous destruction ; it was perpetrated by her own 
contending citizens and sons. " National enmities have 
always been fiercest among borderers," writes Lord 
Macaulay ; and he shows how the enmity between the 
Highland borderer and the Lowland borderer along the 
whole frontier was the growth of ages, and was kept 
fresh by constant injuries. Hartley Coleridge some- 
where suggestively remarks, that even animals the most 
fearful of every other species, will fight desperately 
against their own ; and that the Oriental nations, who 
are so quickly put to rout by European troops, perse- 
vere, with mad constancy, in their domestic combats. 
Sir Walter Scott accounts for the deep and envenomed 
feelings of hostility between two of his characters by the 
illustration, " as those of country gentlemen often be- 
come, who, having little to do or think of, are but too 
apt to spend their time in nursing and cherishing petty 
causes of wrath against their near neighbours." A 
modern bard, touching on the strife of classes, has to 
report of it, historically reviewed, that, — 

" In opposites not always seen to glow, 
It swelled in similars, as if its flood. 
Raged hottest in the most related blood." 

National prejudices and hatreds seldom extend, Adam 
Smith maintains, beyontl neighbouring nations. "We 



' INTER FINITIMOS IMMORTALE ODIUM: 223 

very weakly, and foolishly, perhaps, call the French * 
our natural enemies ; and they, perhaps, as weakly and 
foolishly, consider us in the same manner. Neither they 
nor we bear any sort of envy to the prosperity of China 
or Japan." Inter fuiitimos . . . immortelle odium, has 
not Juvenal told the tale, of Ombos and Tentyra ? 
And of the bounds where the rival realms of " Lusitania 
and her sister meet/' a stanza in Childe Harold ex- 
ively says, — 

u Hut these between a silver streamlet glides, 
And scarce a name distinguisheth the brook, 
Though rival kingdoms press its verdant sides. 
Here leans the idle shepherd on his crook, 
And vacant on the rippling waves doth look. 
That peaceful still 'twixt bitterest foemen flow.'' 

Cowper, in the opening of the second book of 
The Task : — 

" Lands intersected by a narrow frith 
Abhor each other. Mountains interposed, 
Make enemies of nations, who had else 
Like kindred drops been mingled into one." 

Rut where defined boundary lines are altogether want- 

• Miss Aikin, writing in 1829 to Dr. Charming, incidentally re- 
in afraid that Canada keeps up in your country a some- 
>;tter feeling against England which here is not reciproi 
for when we want to hate our neighbours, the French are far more 
handy than you." — Life and Letters of Lucy Aikin y p. 206. 

ivil war in America, cisatlantic critics obs 

iiich of its peculiar ferocity from the circumstance 

. piteful, and word uttered on the one 

ip by the other with an instant and perfect com- 

ining ; and that it was pr« cause North 

outh undci h other without the help of an interpreter 

that th r with a bitterness unknown in Eui 

an expression of doubt whether England and 
■ would he much better friends il glishman spoke 

Frenchman English, like a native. 



224 FEUDS OF FAMILIES AND RACES. 

ing, all the more sharply pronounced is the hostility of 
neighbouring races. The deadly hatred that grew up 
between the Franks and Saxons has been called inevit- 
able, as between two warlike and restless races, sepa- 
rated by a doubtful and unmarked border, on vast level 
plains, with no natural boundary, dense forests, a chain 
of mountains, or any large river or lake. At the time 
of the Syrian massacres, what was here complained of 
as aggravating the difficulty, was the unfortunate juxta- 
position and intermixture of the Druse and Maronite 
population : in other wild districts, hostile tribes have 
frontiers to cross before they fight, but the rival races 
of the Lebanon occupy the same valleys, and live side 
by side in the same villages. 

M. Dozy asserts, in his Histoire des Musulmans cVEs- 
pagne, that in all the history of Europe there is nothing 
to be compared with the hatred that existed between 
the two Arab races, the Yemenites and the Maaddites, 
who divided the dominion of Arabia ; sometimes dorm- 
ant, it was more often in a state of fierce activity, and 
the combatants massacred one another on the most 
trifling grounds — because a melon had been plucked 
in a garden, or a leaf had been twitched in passing from 
a vine. A philosophic investigator of the natural his- 
tory of cruelty, in its varying phases and stages of 
development, observes of it, that when spoken of as 
ruthless, pitiless, blood-stained, fiendish, we somehow 
involuntarily recall the family feuds of ancient Greece 
or mediaeval Europe, where the diminished area of strife 
lent the virulence of a closer personality to the more 
elementary emotion. Macaulay says of the politician 
where factions run high, that the strongest aversion 
which he can feel to any foreign power is the ardour of 
friendship, when compared with the loathing which he 
entertains towards those domestic foes with whom he is 



I XXEIGHBOURL V NEIGH BO I 'RS. 



cooped up in a narrow space, with whom he lives in a 
tant interchange of petty injuries and insults, and 
from whom, in the day of their success, he has to 
expect severities far beyond any that a conqueror from 
a distant country would inflict. Different shades of the 
same colour do not harmonize so well as opposite 
colours, says Michelet ; "and all great hatreds are be- 
tween relatives." In his history of the Third Crusade 
•e each side get to hate itself more than the enemy. 
Richard is less the enemy of Saladin than of Philip- 
istus; and Saladin detests the Assassins and the 
Alides more than the Christians. In his account of the 
Flemi . again, describing the manufacturing rival- 

i the hamlets of Flanders, " Hence, terrible hates," 
lis us, "inexpiable deeds of violence, sieges of 
or Jerusalem against some paltry burgh ; the 
infinite of passion in the infinitely little. " His chapter 
on feudalism in the fifteenth century records of feudal 
families, that, separated by old hatreds, they rarely 
allied themselves with their neighbour ; to be neighbour, 
to be foe; they rather sought, even at the ex- 
•vof the kingdom, alliance with the most distant 
er. And that is a significant passage in which, 
equent volume, the historian of France traces 
y and deep-seated grudge between Dinant and 
What ought to have cemented a 
undcrstandin. n the rival towns, he .shows to 

>n the contrary, to increase and complicate 
: — intermarriages produced innumerable clash- 
onstant lawsuits, in addition to the 
ty of the two towns ; and thus, "know- 
ing one another, and detesting one another, they spent 
their whole life in mutual watchings and espial," till out- 

mdied to and fn i : ( 
ne side the stream, and Proudmount's 



226 ODIUM THEOLOGICUM. 

tower on the other, having been seemingly built on 
purpose to facilitate the interchange of wrongs. 

Prescott says of the numerous petty States which rose 
from the ruins of the ancient monarchy of Spain, that 
they seemed to regard each other with a fiercer hatred 
even than that with which they viewed the enemies of 
their faith : more Christian blood was wasted in these 
national feuds, than in all their encounters with the 
infidel. In another of his histories, that of the conquest 
of Peru, he describes the struggle of the battle of Las 
Salinas as desperate, for it was not that of the white man 
against the defenceless Indian, but of Spaniard against 
Spaniard, who fought with a hate to which national 
antipathy was as nothing — a hate strong in proportion to 
the strength of the ties which had been rent asunder. 

Dean Milman's account of the Mokawkas and the 
whole Coptic population preferring to the rule of those 
who asserted two natures in Christ, that of those (the 
Saracens) who altogether denied His divinity, is designed 
to illustrate " the principle that religious hatred is more 
intense against those who differ the least in opinion." 
Montesquieu broadly affirms, in the Persian Letters, that, 
en fait de religion, les plus proches sont les plus grands 
ennemis. Mr. Trollope's Eleanor, in Barchester Towers, 
tells an earnest dignitary of the Church, " I never saw 
anything like you clergymen, you are always thinking of 
fighting each other." He defends the practice on prin- 
ciple, as a good churchman militant ; and when she re- 
joins, " Ah, but you wage your wars about trifles so 
bitterly," his answer is, that wars about trifles are always 
bitter, especially among neighbours. When the differ- 
ences are great, and the parties comparative strangers, 
men quarrel with courtesy. " What combatants are 
ever so eager as brothers ?"" It has been suggested as 
plausible, that men's most violent prejudices have a 



i close 



ODIUM THEOLOGICUM. 22? 

affinity with what they most like, from which they are 

separated by an invisible line : thus, religious parties 

that hold almost ever}' belief in common, hate one another 

most fervently ; and even where a man neither knows 

.'. n opinions nor those of his theological opponent, 

.cry possible for a strong prejudice to exist, founded 

on a mere supposition of minute difference. Macaulay 

taunted orthodoxy with being more shocked by the 

ts of Rome than by the priests of Kalee, and with 

deeming the plain red- brick building where uneducated 

men hear a half-educated man talk of the Christian law 

of l<»ve and the Christian hope of glory, to be unworthy 

of the indulgence reserved for the shrine where the Thug 

nds a portion of the spoils of murdered travellers, 

and for the car which is or was said to grind its way 

.;h the bones of self- immolated pilgrims. Nothing 

is so difficult, according to a dissertator on contrasts of 

opinion, as to separate the substance from the form, and 

criminate between essential and trifling issues ; but 

.'.1 events clear that the tendency is entirely 

eratiun of apparent differences. We 

. at the opinions which resemble 

our own, just as we are shocked at a monkey for being 

1 man. "It is the caricature, and not the total 

tanding, which is irritating." Hence the very 

' >n with which we regard our opponents i 

f of the wide extent of our stock of 
imon ide 

men will stop each other's breath, 
And other up 

If they but differ a pin's point in faith.'' 

The men who, says the Caxton Essayist, admit into 
frith thing element of brotherly love, are, no 

[uent, the worst enemies 
t0 th 2, and in critical perio 



228 'THE EXQUISITE RANCOUR 

history have been the destroyers of States, and the sub- 
verters of the causes they adopt. Religion, says Cowper, 
should extinguish strife, 

" And make a calm of human life ; 
But friends that chance to differ 
On points which God has left at large, 
How fiercely will they meet and charge ! 
No combatants are stiffer." 

Shaftesbury sneers at the " supernatural charity " that 
has " taught us the way of plaguing one another most 
devoutly. It has raised an antipathy which no temporal 
interest could ever do ; and entailed upon us a mutual 
hatred to all eternity." Such passages abound in his 
writings, and in those of other distinguished unbelievers, 
the Bolingbrokes, Humes, Gibbons. In his letter on 
Enthusiasm, for instance, Shaftesbury maliciously ob- 
serves, that " since first the snappish spirit got up in 
religion, all sects have been at it, as the saying is, ' tooth 
and nail/ and are never better pleased than in worrying 
one another without mercy." In another treatise he 
complains that the simple honest precepts of peace and 
mutual love have, " by a sort of spiritual chymists, been 
so sublimated, as to become the highest corrosives ; and 
passing through their limbecks, have yielded the strong- 
est spirit of mutual hatred and malignant persecution." 
In another he remarks, that when all other animosities 
are allayed, and anger of the fiercest kind . appeased, 
" the religious hatred, we find, continues still, as it began, 
without provocation or voluntary offence." Bolingbroke, 
again, declares the clergy to have a much better title 
than the sons of Apollo to be called gens irritabile 
vatum ; and he would have relished to the full the 
flavour of a living philosopher's remark, that our brother 
man is seldom so bitter against us, as when we refuse to 
adopt at once his notions of the infinite. He would 
more likely have demurred to Sir James Stephen's 



OF THEOLOGICAL HATRED: 

remark, that the odium theologicum is, after all, rather a 

vituperative than a malignant affection, even in its worst 

But he would have backed with eager emphasis 

the affirmation implied in Sir James's query, elsewhere 

propounded : * From speculations on the love of God to 

feelings of hatred to man, what polemic will not readily 

whether his cap be red or black ?" Hume speaks 

of the Odium TJtcologicum as "noted even to a proverb," 

and as meaning that degree of rancour which is the 

furious and implacable. Sects of philosophy, in 

indent world, were more zealous than part; 

n ; "but in modern times, parties of religion are 

furious and enraged than the most cruel factions 

that ever arose from interest and ambition/' Gibbon is 

in being able to back the Pagan historian Ammi- 

anus with the testimony of a Christian bishop, when to 

xperience of the former, which had convinced him 

that the enmity of the Christians towards each other 

I the fury of savage beasts against man, he 

ihe pathetic lament of Gregory Nazianzen, that the 

I )m of heaven was transformed, by discord, into 

of chaos, of a nocturnal tempest, and of hell 

In the same chapter, Gibbon describes Li ben us 

and Osius, in exile (A.D. 356/, as soon becoming satisfied 

f Libya, and the most barbarous ! 

inhospitable than a residence 

in th in which "an Arian bishop could satiate, 

without restraint, the exquisite rancour of theological 

:." Swift impersonates a divine speaker, around 

immortal glories shine, while thus she 

" Religion is u 

An angd once, but now a fill 

little known : 
Is it for me, my sons, tl 

And .spend the fury of yOUX idle 1. 



230 SECTARIAN STRIFE. 

'Tis false ; unmanly spleen your bosom warms, 
And a pretended zeal your fancy charms. 
Where have I taught you in the sacred page 
To construe moderation into rage V 

Speaking of the most conspicuous of Wesley's anti- 
Arminian adversaries, the brothers Hill (Rowland and 
Sir Richard), and Augustus Montague Toplady, whose 
writings were so " thoroughly saturated with the essen- 
tial acid of Calvinism," Southey alleges that it would 
scarcely be credible that three persons, of good birth 
and education, and of unquestionable goodness and 
piety, should have carried on controversy u in so vile a 
manner, and with so detestable a spirit — if the hatred of 
theologians had not unhappily become proverbial." The 
names of opprobrium flung to and fro in this sort of free 
fight, remind us of a celebrated letter of Paul Louis 
Courier : " II m'appelle jacobin, revolutionnaire, plagiaire, 
voleur, empoisonneur, faussaire, pestifere ou pestifere, 
enrage, imposteur, calomniateur, libelliste, homme horri- 
ble, ordurier, grimacier, chiffonnier . . . • . Je vois ce 
qu'il veut dire ; il entend que lui et moi sommes d'avis 
different.-" An eminent reviewer of our day has re- 
marked, with regard to the distinction between theologi- 
cal language and secular, that when certain persons say, 
" You will infallibly be damned," they must be under- 
stood to mean simply, " Your opinion differs from ours." 
Mr. Motley cannot look back upon the passionate days 
of controversy between Maurice and Barneveld without 
being " appalled at the depths to which theological 
hatred could descend." Yet, deeper and deeper still, 
might seem its subsequent descents, to some observers. 
M. Louis Yeuillot is declared by a Saturday Reviewer to 
have probably never had an equal in the virulence, the 
coarseness, and the recklessness of his theological vitu- 
peration ; and a censor in the British Quarterly holds 



ODIUM THEOLOGICUM. 251 

'.hen the history of contemporary Atheism shall be 

written, Veuillot must come in for much of the blame, 

"for if anything could inspire a horror of religion, or 

extenuate the blasphemies of the time, it may be found 

in the career of this furious zealot/' The contests of 

•us newspapers are apt to be personal, says Mr. 

>pe, who speaks of heavy, biting, scorching attacks 

as the natural vehicle of Christian Examiners ; for how, 

, is a newspaper writer to refrain himself when his 

incurring everlasting punishment, or, worse 

still, carrying away others to a similar doom, in that they 

and perhaps even purchase, that which the lost one 

mitten?" Malice and mutual hatred come to be 

accounted a duty in certain cases ; and peace there 

>t be, because any resting from the duty of hatred 

who reciprocally seem to lay the founda- 

■f their creed in a dishonouring of God, is, in De 

impossible to aspiring human nature." 

ribes two such conflicting parties as fast- 

the other in the extreme of fury, resem- 

\k\ wolves ac harm's a scntrc-ctichirer, 

-istians and philosophers who sought to 

enlighten and convince each other, and bring back the 

; into the way of truth. Poundtext and Kettle- 

drummle, in the camp of the Covenanters at Loudon- 

hill, scandalize Balfour of Hurley himself by the disunion 

implied in their virulent strife of ton-Mies; and for a 

But although the 
thus for the time silenc con- 

h other lil a]io, h.n 

by the authority of their masters while light- 
Sir Walter des< ribes it (and he 
nine characteristic ->, each beneath the 
ill watching each other's motions, 
and indi owls, by the ei 



232 A CONTENTIOUS WIFE. 

bristles of the back and ears, and by the red glance of 
the eye, that their discord is unappeased, and that they 
only wait the first opportunity afforded by any general 
movement or commotion in the company, to fly once 
more each at the other's throat. 



XXL 

THE CONTINUAL DROPPING OF A CON- 
TENTIOUS WIFE. 
Proverbs xix. 13 ; xxvii. 15. 

FAR above rubies is the price set, in the words of King 
Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him, 
upon the true womanly wife who openeth her mouth with 
wisdom, and in whose tongue is the law of kindness. 
But in the proverbs of Solomon it is written that the 
contentions ' of a wife are a continual dropping ; and 
again, that a continual dropping in a very rainy day, 
and a contentious woman, are alike. With such a wife, 
to adopt Bishop Patrick's paraphrase, " a man is no 
more able to live at home, than to dwell in a rotten 
and ruinous house, through the roof of which the rain 
drops perpetually." There is a worse thing even than 
wretchedness in 

" the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof," 

and that is, when the rain comes through. 

Xantippe, as M. St. Marc Girardin takes it, was not 
the only vixenish, shrewish, cross-grained, acaridtre 
woman of antiquity ; but her violence, as associated 
with the serene wisdom of her husband, made a name 
for her that will be long-lived as his. She is the 
established type of the contentious woman. Nor was 
she much less of a torment to her son than to her 
husband. Socrates, however, putting up patiently with 



■REJVS AXD SCOLDS. 233 

the whims and caprices of his wife, enforced upon 
Lamprocles the duty of bearing with respect the irri- 
tating outbreaks of his mother. Seasoned topers have 
s sentimental way of regarding the sage : 

■ Socrate, cet homme discret 
Que toute la terre reVere, 
Allait manger au cabaret 

Ouand sa femme etait en colere." 

Petruchio is nothing daunted by Hortensio's report 
of Katharine as " intolerably curst, and shrewd, and 
froward ; so beyond all measure, that," adds the report- 
er, " were my state far worser than it is, I would not 
wed her for a mine of gold." Petruchio will woo and 
I her off-hand, were she 

" as curst and shrewd 

As Socrates' Xantippe, or a worse ; 

. . . were she as rough 

As are the swelling Adriatic seas." 

Of shrewish Xantippe it has been shrewdly said, that 

he been married to a small tradesman of Athens, 

ould most likely never have risen above the rank 

of a mere ill-tempered woman ; — but to have an eminent 

popular lecturer to badger — a man who was one of the 

of the day, whose carte de visite, 

., might be seen in every window — this v. 

to be neglected by a genuine sports- 
in ; and she seized it, and won herself a deathless 
in Dr. Lempriere's Dictionary, as the most ac- 
Tartar of ancient tim 
In illustration of the fact that a number of good old- 
those pictorial and uncompromising 
in which our forefathers delighted, have 
I use, and been replaced by polite paraphi 
which av.»id nothing so much as calling things by their 
irk has been made, that we have 
colds now, but sensitive temperaments and 



234 WEDLOCK WORRIES OF SOCRATES, LUTHER, 

nervous organizations, irritable natures and difficult 
tempers. " Of shrews and scolds we have as little as 
of the ducking-stool which was their punishment. And 
yet the class survives, though its name and award have 
both passed away." Such a young person as " Katharine 
the curst " could not, indeed, exist for a moment in any 
modern drawingroom ; but for all its softer manifestation, 
humanity is not yet purged of its evil humour of shrew- 
ishness. It is shown to have been the lot of many 
great men besides Socrates to have had the same ill- 
luck in their matrimonial ventures, and to have drawn a 
vixen when they put in for a wife. We are referred to 
Albert Diirer as having drawn such a questionable prize, 
Milton another. Luther is held by some to have been 
deservedly punished for marrying at all, by finding in 
his Catherine a needle-tongued shrew, whose small-beer 
chroniclings and persistent prate vexed his righteous 
soul amid his theological meditations, and broke the 
peace of his sanctum with the din and babble of woman- 
hood when it will not be stilled, like waves that cannot 
rest. That to Richard Hooker the happiness of Heaven 
should seem to consist primarily in Order, as indeed in 
all human societies this is the first thing needful, has 
been suggestively accounted for, not only because he 
had been employed in contending against a public spirit 
of disorder and insubordination, but because his life 
had been passed under the perpetual discomfort of 
domestic discord. Of his wife Joan, Izaak Walton says 
that she brought him neither beauty nor portion ; and 
" for her conditions, they were too like that wife's, which 
is by Solomon compared to a dripping house : so that 
he had no reason to ' rejoice in the wife of his youth,' 
but rather to say with the holy prophet, ' Woe is me, that 
I am constrained to have my habitation in the tents of 
Kedar ! ' " If Hooker was a reader of Chaucer, there 



RICHARD HOOKER, TERTULLIAX. 235 

haply would often rise to his memory, if not fall from 
his lips, the regretful words of the Marchaunde, in the 
prologue to his tale, — 

" Were I unbounden . . . 
I wolde never eft come in the snare. 
We weddid men live in sowre and care." 

Hannah More makes a point of weighting in life 
that '•humble, pious, diligent/' and altogether exemp- 
lary curate, Mr. Jackson, in Calebs, with a partner who 
is the reverse of a help-meet. For, " this valuable man, 
who was about as good a judge of the world as the 
great Hooker, made just as indiscreet a marriage." The 
patient, retiring and retired Clutterbuck in Pelham, is 
another instance in point : the reverend scholar owns 
for wife "a small woman with a sharp pointed nose, 
small, cold, grey eyes, and a complexion high towards 
the cheek-bones, but waxing of a licdit green before it 
reached the wide and querulous mouth." How wretched 
that contentious woman can make that unresisting man, 
t forth in a chapter which readers of Lord Lytton's 
first fiction of real mark will scarcely have forgotten. 
The Vicar of Shipley Magna, again, in Veronica, is 
weighted in life with a fretful and slatternly conjux y 
who "turned out to have a shrewish tongue, ami to be 
energetic in the using of it," and whose vulgar family 
iblished themselves in the vicarage and lorded it 
over the vicar as only the callousness of vulgarity can. 

mala crux, conjux mala ; crux taim-n ilia ferend 
mo nisi Mors te relevare 

The Italian historian of "All II 1 by 

him (Domenico Bernino) t«» Pope Clement XI., quol 
the warning instance <»f Tel tullian throwing himself 

into the troubl <>f matrimony, and no sooner 

than, being made \\ iffering, he 

d his laborii MoUstiis Nuptiarum i 



236 VIXEN AND VIRAGO, SHREW AND SCOLD. 

finding- in that employment the only relief from those 
continual miseries which, testifies Bernino himself, " we 
who now write can bear witness to faithfully " and feel- 
ingly. Burton cites the case of Bartholomseus Scheraeus, 
" that famous Poet Laureate " and Professor of Hebrew 
at Wittenberg, who said in the introduction to a work 
of his upon the Psalms, that he should have finished it 
long before, but amongst many miseries which almost 
broke his back — qitce misero mihi pene tergum fregerunt 
— he was yoked to a worse than Xantippe. The surmise 
has been ventured of it being perhaps part of the moral 
training of a certain kind of hero, that he should have a 
shrewish wife, on the principle of the grace which comes 
by tribulation, and the nobleness to be got at only under 
the pressure of daily chastisement : anyway, great men 
have often married themselves to shrewish wives, and 
curst tempers have been mated with patient ones more 
frequently than happily. Those who define and dis- 
tinguish are quick to tell us that a shrew is by no means 
a virago, that although she may be a vixen, she is sel- 
dom ferocious, her pleasure being to scold, not to strike. 
The house over which a shrew presides is notoriously a 
weariness to the souls of those forced to dwell therein. 
" She is for ever scolding the servants when she is not 
changing them ; and servants never do well when they 
are scolded." The same kind of thing goes on with her 
children ; and as to her husband, — " Poor shrew ! that 
proverb about the dinner of herbs and the stalled ox 
has never carried any weight with her or taught her any 
lesson." John Bunyan would have women, " whenever 
they would perk and lord it over their husbands," to re- 
member that " both by creation and transgression they 
are made to be in subjection to them." Such a thing, 
he admits, may happen, as that the woman, not the 
man, may be in the right, — " I mean when both are 



WESLEY AXD HIS WIFE. 237 

godly, — but ordinarily it is otherwise," he sees no reason 
to doubt. John Wesley's wife so tormented her husband 
by her outrageous jealousy and abominable temper, that 
Southey accounts her worthy to be classed in a triad 
with Xantippe and the wife of Job, as one of the three 
bad wives.* Wesley, indeed, is shown to have been 
neither so submissive as Socrates nor so patient as the 
man of Uz. She " sometimes laid violent hands upon 
him, and tore his hair." But he knew that he was by 
nature the stronger vessel, of the more worthy gender, 
and lord and master by law: and that the words 'honour 
and obey ' were in the bond. And he stickled for the 
bond. Like Shylock, he would have his bond. Neither 
eminence in piety, nor eminence in philosophy, nor emi- 
nence in pugilism, avails to save a man from this sort 
of vexation ; for, as regards the last of the three, a late 
Champion of England was, according to the police 
reports, a fellow-sufferer with Socrates and with Wesley. 

" Be merry, be merry, my wife's as all ; 
For women are shrews, both short and tall," 

quavers Justice Silence over Justice Shallow's pippins 
and cheese and wine. When Leontes cannot stop the 
mouth of the wife of his counsellor Antigonus — a 
"callet." or scold, he terms her, "of boundless tongue, 
who late hath beat her husband, and now baits me" — 
the king at last tells the counsellor he is worth)" to be 
•iiat will not stay her tongue. Antigonus bluffly 
r 

iiithey himself who. 

fe as a m 

and aims of himself, thai u aa Dr. 

South' this injured Matriarch in a triad with Xantippe 

and .V did and learned 

!. r her justice, and in tl. ;tion of his 

Life of WesUy substitute Hooker's wife- in her p! 



238 MAKING HOME A PURGATORY. 

" Hang all the husbands 

That cannot do that feat, you'll leave yourself 
Hardly one subject." 

The shrew as painted by the old masters, as in their 
day of the highest classes, is said to be found now only 
among the people, where indeed she is not infrequent — 
that shrill-voiced, ferret-eyed, sharp-nosed little woman 
who stands with her arms akimbo, and scolds at all 
creation. But beyond this "primitive type of the 
shrew " we confessedly have enough and to spare of a 
more refined kind among the educated ; good women 
even, who are content to stay at home and look after 
their house and children, but who "take out in ill- 
humour what they deny to naughtiness." And the odd 
part of the business is held to be, that most shrews are 
unconscious of deserving blame : the woman who rails 
and fumes at every trifling annoyance that occurs, till 
she makes the whole house miserable, does not know 
that she is committing a sin. " She does not dream 
that she is digging the grave of her own happiness and 
esteem ; but, after she has worried her family to the 
very verge of madness, laments her hard case in not 
being loved — she who would do so much for them ! " 
And so she would in all probability, her censors freely 
admit ; for nine times out of ten it is her temper, not 
her heart, that is in fault ; and the most uncomfortable 
shrew is often found capable of the most heroic virtue 
when the pinch comes. Many a shrew is said to have 
broken her heart before now for what seems to be the 
ingratitude and coldness of those whom her own temper 
only drove from her. Her children either leave home 
prematurely or marry ill : they neither see nor care for 
the real love and sterling goodness often underlying that 
bitter temper: all they know is, " that mamma is always 
cross and that she makes their lives wretched." As for 



TO A GOOD BOOK IX A BAD TEMPER. 239 

her husband, she is " of so much use by her perpetual 
nagging that she saves the necessity of purgatory after 
death by giving him the full benefit of it beforehand." 
In Mr. Chauncy Hare Townshend's allegory, — 

" Ill-nature had a heart susceptible, 
And all the world behaved so wickedly 
To her, that if she made her home a hell, 
Twas not her fault, and only what should be." 

What some women pride themselves in, and call a high 

spirit, Hartley Coleridge declares to be only strong 
against the weak, cruel to the kind, and utterly unavail- 
ing when its use becomes justifiable. It is only, he 
affirms, in duty, affection, piety, that woman can or 
ought to be strong : her power is in her weakness. Sir 
Arthur Helps moralizes on the numerous instances of 
severe tyranny which every observant man of the world 
must have seen exercised by " weak " women — which 
tyranny has been established, continued, and endured 
ly by reason of the weakness, real or supposed, of 
the persons exercising it. George Eliot's Mrs. Glegg is 
.i truly representative woman when she quarrels with 
her husband because of his compassionate temper, and 
shuts herself up in her own room with Baxter's Saints' 
Rest from morning till might, denying herself to all 
visitors. The affected resort to religion by certain soured 
and shallow souls feminine, "of the baser sort," who do 
it to anno}', and are pious out of spite, and claim the 

privilege of superior sanctity to make home unpleasant 

to the family in general and to the husband in particular, 

has often been the theme of satire in fiction. Smollett 
Ltes of .Mrs. Trunnion, that "the first respite from 

her chagrin was employed in the strict discharge of what 

are called the duties of religion, which .she performed 
with the most rancorous severity, setting on foot .1 per- 
secution in her own family that harassed the commodore 



240 SHREWS AND SCOLDS IN FICTION 

himself out of all patience," and made the house too hot 
for every one else. Years later we are told of the effec- 
tive discipline of the same lady, who "by the force of 
pride, religion, and cognac, had erected a most terrible 
tyranny in the house." Mrs. Berry is one of those 
" Men's Wives " sketched by Titmarsh, whose tactics 
are significant ; as where, at supper-time, " she gave a 
martyrized look, and left the room ; and while we par- 
took of the very unnecessary repast, was good enough 
to sing some hymn tunes to an exceedingly slow move- 
ment in the next room, intimating that she was awake, 
and that, though suffering, she found her consolations 
in religion," such as, to her taste and in her temper, it 
might be. Mrs. Furnival, in Orley Farm, is proposed as 
a model of the female married victim who ever makes 
the very most of such positive wrongs as Providence 
may vouchsafe her. But pre-eminent in her kind, this 
kind, is the Mrs. Varney of Dickens. She is most de- 
vout when most ill-tempered. Whenever she and her 
husband are at unusual variance, the Protestant Manual 
is her constant companion. She is seldom very Protes- 
tant at meals, unless it happens that they are underdone, 
or over-done, or indeed that anything occurs to put her 
out of humour. Then again there is Mrs Wilfer, on 
principle " in a sombre darkling state/' with " lurid in- 
dications " of storm visible athwart the awful gloom of 
her composure ; and the Mrs. Fielding of a much 
earlier story, whose "Now carry me to the grave," 
uttered in absolute health, would lapse in a state of 
dreadful calmness, and that in a bitterly sarcastic mood, 
she being a nobody, whom nobody ought to trouble 
themselves about, and so forth, usque ad nauseam, necnon 
ultra. As Gresset's Geronte is driven to protest, — 

" Oh ! parbleu ! tout ceci commence a m'ennuyer : 
Je suis las des humeurs qu'il me faut essuyer ; 



FEMININE FRACTIOUSNE. 241 

Comment ! on ne peut plus etre un seul jour tranquille ! 
Je vois bien qu'elle boude, et je connais son style ; 
Eh bien ! moi, les boudeurs sont mon aversion, 
Et je n'en veux jamais soutTrir dans ma maison. 

****** 

m'excede enfin. Je veux que tout le monde 
pone bien chez moi, que personne n'y gronde.'' 

The y may be a Sic volo y sic jubeo ; but where 

there is a woman's will the other way, the master of the 
house is not quite sure of the master}-. 

ft contrasts, not compares, a cloudy sky with a 
cloudy-tempered wife : — 

" The bolt discharged, the sky grows clear ; 
But every sublunary dowdy, 
The more she scolds, the more she's cloudy. 
***** 

You know a cloudy sky bespeaks 
Fair weather when the morning breaks ; 
Iiut women in a cloudy plight 
Foretell a storm to last till night."' 

A clerical onviction that many able, 

men have never had a fair chance in life, their 
. their views embittered. 
their .ture soured, by what he calls "a co: 

line of petty whips and scourges, and little prick- 
through pure stolidity 
and ^ f nature) by an ill-mated wife ; 

by flying from their own fireside that they 
cape the u- lily, with its petty, irritat- 

ling stin t even the - 

nt man, says Jean Paul Richter, can hold out 
in the loncj ru: I the eternal pouting 

D man. The author of a trad Man 

and 1 of " n. that no form of 

torture which 1 invent 

r, in Pub 
a mistress that"s always nagging and nagging. A good noise once 

R 



242 CONTINUAL DROPPING. 

slow dropping of water on some highly sensitive part of 
the frame, can afford a parallel to this ingenious appli- 
cation of the principle of penitence. "The absolute 
certainty that, when snub, or scolding, or refusal have 
died into silence, the word will be said over again ; the 
certainty that it will be said year after year, month after 
month, week after week ; the irritation of expecting it, 
the irritation of hearing it, the irritation of expecting it 
again, tell on the firmest will in the world." Only souls 
feminine are up to the mark in the matter of such itera- 
tions, — 

" Which to pursue, were but a feminine humour, 
And far beneath the dignity of man/' 

as Ben Jonson has it in the Poetaster. The Abbess in 
Shakspeare's Comedy of En r ors approves in the abstract 
of Adriana's reprehending her faulty husband ; but 
when she comes to particulars, and learns the lady's 
modus operandi, she can at once account for the husband 
going out of his mind : in public as well as private, 
Adriana lectured, upbraided, reprehended Antipholus, 
in bed and at board : — 

"In bed, he slept not for my urging it ; 

At board, he fed not for my urging it ; 

Alone, it was the subject of my theme ; 

In company, I often glanced at it ; 

Still did I tell him it was vile and bad. 
Abbess. And thereof came it, that the man was mad." 

The continual " dropping " of the text is written 
" dripping" by some old divines. That reminds us of 
Sheridan's comment on the " drip, drip," of the lines in 
Coleridge's Remorse. " Drip — drip — drip ?• — Why, here's 
nothing but dripping." 

in a way she don't mind— it brisks up one's blood ; but she has 
known mistresses always pushing their words at you and about 
you, as if they were sticking pins in a cushion with no flesh and 
blood. 



XXII. 

THE DIVINI1Y THAT SHAPES OUR ENDS. 

Proverbs xx. 24. 

THE divine controls the human in its outgoings and 
the issue of them all. " Man's goings are of the 
Lord ; how can a man then understand his own way ?" 
There is a way that seems right to a man, but the end 
thereof is death. There's a divinity that shapes our 
ends, rough-hew them how we will. u There are many 
devices in a man's heart ; nevertheless, the counsel of 
the Lord, that shall stand." Chance gets the credit 
of the controlling influence, in the Greek proverb, 
TavTofiarov y)fi6)v (caWtco ftovXeverai,. But Hamlet reads 
the matter better when he affirms, in a passage from 
which the pith has already been extracted, but of which 
t!ie whole context is pregnant and pith)' enough to bear 
Uon, that — 

r indiscretion sometimes serves us well 
When our deep plot-, do pall ; and that should teach us 
There's a divinity lh;it shapes our ends, 

Igh-hew them how we will." 

The out-come of tin: roughest of rough-hewing is shapely, 

' tl I [and <>f God has been working in and 
by tin- hand of man, and a Divine Artist has ordered 
the workmanship of the human artisan. 

It is well seen and said, that no doubt every life is full 
of mistakes ; and the rare possibility of finding in our 

own case which of them has told la 

imrut against morbidly dwelling upon 
them ; for, hat sort of 

mi ■• ; the mil Others — our 



244 ' THERE'S A DIVINITY 

own sensitiveness is proved to be a far from infallible 
judge. " We may then be attaching mighty conse- 
quences to some indiscretion which has really served 
us well, while the mistake which has damaged us may 
lurk altogether out of our cognizance." Who, as Dr. 
Rowland Williams asks, has not known impulse saving 
those whom deliberation before temptation would have 
ruined ; and accident, or one of those tokens of Providence 
which seem accidental, opening a path which calculation 
could not have devised ? Butler's couplet is pointed 
and pertinent : — 

" Some people's fortunes, like a weft or stray, 
Are only gained by losing of their way." 

Campbell, on the other hand, reflects "how oft the 
wisest, on misfortune's shelves are wrecked by errors most 
unlike themselves." Addison reflects how very often it 
happens that prudence, which has always in it a great 
mixture of caution, hinders a man from being so 
fortunate as he might possibly have been without it. 
" A person who only aims at what is likely to succeed, 
and follows closely the dictates of human prudence, 
never meets with those great and unforeseen successes, 
which are often the effect of a sanguine temper or a 
more happy rashness." This is indeed but a paraphrase 
of the Shakspearean doctrine that our indiscretion some- 
times serves us well. The moral attached to La Fon- 
taine's fable of the two adventurers and the talisman, is 
in scope, if not in terms, equivalent : — 

" Fortune aveugle suit aveugle hardiesse. 
Le sage quelquefois fait bien d'exe'cuter 
Avant que de donner le temps a la sagesse 
D'envisager le fait, et sans la consulter." 

That was in every sense a lucky hit which Protogenes 
the painter made, when painting the dog whose foaming 
at the mouth was so much admired. Pliny tells us how 



THAT SHAPES OUR ENDS* 245 

long the artist essayed in vain to please himself in 
representing this foam, till at last, disheartened by 
repeated failures, he flung his sponge at the mouth of 
the dog, and this fling accidentally produced the very 
t desiderated and desired. Another story elsewhere 
told by Pliny, is that of Jason of P he raj, who, being given 
over by the physicians on account of a desperate im- 

thume in his breast, and having a mind to rid himself 
of his pain, by death at least, in a battle flung himself 
into the very thickest of the fight, and was so fortunately 

mded quite through the body, that the imposthume 
broke, and he was perfectly cured. Valerius Maximus 
rather heightens the miraculous tone of the narrative, 
in his version of it, for he makes out Jason to have 
received this friendly wound from an assassin. Mon- 
taigne seems to have had both of Pliny's stories in in- 
direct remembrance when, in one of his essays, he 
argues that fortune has a great share in physic, as m 
several other more certain arts ; and adds, that in 
painting, there will sometimes slip from the hand of the 
artist touches so far surpassing both his fancy and his 
art, as to excite his own admiration and astonishment. 
"I. I a mieux fait que nuns tOUS, ma petite," 

Suzanne in Beaumarchais : "Ainsi va le 
m >nde ; on travaille, on projette, on arrange d'un cdte* ; 
la fortune I'accomplit d'un autre." There is uncertainty 
in wisdom, as well as in folly, muses Owen I'Yltham, of 
the K often happens it that when a man 

plot • himself, his plottin in his ruin, and 

I his own wit i an into those snares which 

above all things he would shun. "What we suspect and 

would avoid innot; what we suspect not, we fall 

ini"." We use means of preservation, and they prove 

means of perdition. We take courses that imply ruin, 

d they prove in the sequel our security. It is in vain, 



246 'THERE'S A DIVINITY 

philosophizes M. de Wolmar, that we essay to give to 
things human a solidity which is not in the nature of 
them : reason itself is for leaving many things to chance. 
Lewis the Fourteenth had said much the same thing 
long before, in one of those maximes royales in virtue 
of which a great French critic recognizes in the Grand 
Monarque a veritable man of talent in the difficult art of 
reigning. Wisdom itself enjoins, his Majesty says, that 
in certain situations much should be left to chance ; 
reason itself then prompts acquiescence in those nonde- 
script movements, or blind instincts, which are above 
reason, and which seem to come from heaven. The 
Princess Orsini was of the same opinion. Too many 
wise people, she submits, or at least wise in their own 
conceit, take themselves to be most wise when they run 
no risk, and leave nothing to chance. She was per- 
suaded of the expediency of sometimes laisser les choses 
an hasard, provided the laisser-aller be not pushed to 
the verge, or over it, of temerity and foolhardiness, such 
as figures properly nowhere but in romance. Froissart's 
reflection is admired as assez piquante, in its way, which 
is his way : " Ainsi adviennent souvent les fortunes en 
armes et en amours, plus heureuses et plus merveilleuses 
qu'on ne les pourroit ni oseroit penser et souhaiter." 
Hazlitt made it a specially characteristic charge against 
Mr. Pitt, that, in defending his political conduct, he 
never seemed to consider himself at all responsible for 
the success of his measures, or to suppose that future 
events were in our own power ; but that, as the best-laid 
schemes might fail, and there was no providing against 
all possible contingencies, this was a sufficient excuse for 
our plunging at once into any dangerous or absurd 
enterprise without the least regard to consequences. 

Goethe said of his Wilhelm Meister to Eckermann, 
that the whole work seems to describe man as being, 



THAT SHAPES OUR EXDS: 247 

despite all his follies and errors, led by a higher hand, 
and reaching some happy goal at last. To a very 
different work of fiction, in our own language, the 
objection has been offered, that if the most trivial 
arrangement for the future is made in one chapter, we 
know beforehand that it will certainly be upset, by 
circumstances over which nobody has any control, in 
the next ; which surely is, however unintentionally, 
giving a " strangely mean and unworthy interpretation 
of Divine Providence," and an interpretation, moreover, 
which all experience, the objector urges, very emphati- 
cally contradicts : — practically, we know that the least 
independent of mortals has a large amount of free-will 
for good or evil : we form our plans, and, generally 
speaking, we are permitted to execute them : our deeds 
arc our own, though their consequences, it is true, are 
in other hands. A divinity shapes our ends, but the 
power of at least rough-hewing them abides with man. 
Goethe had very much to write about controlling destiny 
in the Wahlverwandtschaften y where "that strange 
Mittler" is copious on the topic of man playing blind- 
man's-buff. "The most prudent plans I have seen mis- 
carry, and the most foolish succeed." While life i- 
Sweeping US forwards, muses another of the characters, 
imcy that we are acting out our own impulses — but 
r the mistake later. How often are we not 
turned aside from some point in life's journey Ave v. 
n reaching, but only to reach some higher Sta 
The traveller, to his great annoyance, breaks a wheel on 
the road, and through this vexatious delay makes some 
charming acquaintance, and forms some new connection, 

which has an influence on all his life. " Destiny grants us 

our . out in its own v. the, "in order 

►mething beyond our wishes." lie was the 

man to Und a fund of reflection in what Sir Andrew 



248 < THERE'S A DIVINITY 

Michael related of Frederick the Great after the battle 
of Lignitz ; when the king, after making " some excel- 
lent reflections on the imperfection of human foresight,''* 
declared himself to have laboured to no purpose to bring 
about the very event which had now, by other means, been 
accomplished. One is reminded of Goethe's Mittler 
again, when he, on one occasion, thanks God that " the 
thing cures itself," after all his talking and trying had 
proved fruitless. 

Arthur H. Clough, in Dipsychus, utters the exclama- 
tion, " Oh, it is great — 

" To do and know not what. The dashing stream 
Stays not to pick his steps among the rocks ; 
And though the hunter looks before he leap, 
'Tis instinct rather than a shaped-out thought 
That lifts him his bold way." 

It is the expressed conviction of the same author, in 
one of his prose essays, that very many are they who, 
looking back into their past lives, feel most thankful 
for those acts which came least from their own mere 
natural volition — can see that what did them most good 
was what they themselves would least have chosen ; that 
things, in fact, which they were forced to, were, after all, 
the best things that ever happened to them. Many, he 
is sure, have had reason to bless a wholesome compul- 
sion ; and the mature free-will of the grown man looks 
back, if with some little regret, with as certainly no little 
scorn, upon the bygone "puerile spontaneities'" of the 
time when he did as he liked. Did a man, as Mr. 
Carlyle muses, foresee his life, and not merely hope it, 
and grope it, and so, by necessity and free-will, make 
and fabricate it into a reality, he were no man, but some 
other kind of creature, superhuman or subterhuman. 
From the quite dim uncertain mass of the future, which 
lies there, in the words of the Scottish humorist, " un- 



THAT SHAPES OUR ENDS: 249 

combed, uncarded, like a mass of ' tarry wool ' prover- 
bially 'ill to spin/" man has to, and does, spin out, 
better or worse, his " rumply, infirm thread of existence, 
and wind it up, up, — till the spool is full." Elsewhere 
our philosopher reflects with admiration, in one of his 
critical biographies, how cunningly thrifty is destiny, 
quietly shaping her tools for the work they are to do, 
while she seems but spoiling and breaking them. In 
another he speculates on the drift of " happy accidents" 
— conjectures, for instance, whether, had not want, dis- 
comfort and distress-warrants been busy at Stratford-on- 
Avon, Shakspeare himself had not lived killing calves 
or combing wool. Whether, again, had the Edial board- 
ing-school turned out well, we should ever have so 
much as heard of Samuel Johnson, who in that case had 
been a fat schoolmaster and gerund-grinder, and never 
known that he was more. "Some veiled rower," as 
Croesus in the poem words it, 

" Walks in our midst, and moves us to strange ends, 
Our wills arc Heaven's, and we what Heaven intends." 



XXI 1 1. 
THE BONDAGE THAT COMES OF BORROWING, 

Proverbs xxil 7. 

HT^HE borrower, says the Wise- Kin;.;, Is servant, or 
.1. bondman, to the lender, or, as it is in the margin, 

the man that lendeth. He IS ill bonds to him ; is under 

his thumb ; can scarcely rail his soul and body his own. 

The loan is a dead weight upon the powers of the bor- 
rower until it is discharged; to borrow is to burden 

if with a load in life that may weigh down life, and 
for life, and perhaps wear out life, and outlive life. 
D bts turn freemen into slaves, says the Greek proverb : 



25o THE BORN AND BRED BORROWER. 

"Ta Sdveia SovXovs rov$ ekevOepovs iroiel." It was the 
subtle policy of Eumenes to borrow large sums of those 
grandees who hated him most, in order to secure their 
confidence, or at any rate to make them give up their 
designs upon his life, out of regard to the money lent 
him. Here, by a practical paradox, the lenders were 
made the humble servants of the borrower. Another 
and more direct inversion of the law, or perversion of 
the principle, is curtly enunciated in Pistol's maxim, 
" Base is the slave who pays." Mr. Lister gives us a 
typical man in that Beauchamp whom he designates one 
of those ingenious persons who, without means, contrive 
to indulge in every imaginable luxury, deny themselves 
no gratification, and habitually set expense at nought ; 
who are always deep in debt, yet never seem to feel its 
consequences ; who stake on a race more pounds than 
they are known to have pence, and play every night for 
double their yearly income, and see it lost with the 
coolest indifference. The human species is composed, 
according to Elia's theory, of the men who borrow and 
the men who lend ; and the latter are born degraded. 
" He shall serve his brethren." What a careless, even 
deportment hath your borrower ! the admiring essayist 
exclaims ; " what rosy gills ! what a beautiful reliance 
on Providence doth he manifest, — taking no more 
thought than lilies ! What contempt for money, — ac- 
counting it (yours and mine especially) no better than 
dross ! What a liberal confounding of those pedantic 
distinctions of meum and tunm ! " Elia deems him to be 
the true taxer who " calleth all the world up to be 
taxed ; " and his exactions, too, have such a cheerful, 
voluntary air, so far removed from your sour parochial 
or state-gatherers, " those ink-born varlets, who carry 
their want of welcome in their faces," whereas he cometh 
to you with a smile, and troubleth you with no receipt; 



THE J A I \VT I " HA BIT I 'A L DEB TOR. r 5 r 

confining himself to no set season : every day is his 
Candlemas, or his Feast of Holy Michael. " He is the 
true Propontis which never ebbeth, the sea which taketh 
handsomely at each man's hand. In vain the victim 
whom he delighteth to honour struggles with destiny, 
he is in the net." Hazlitt says of some bold beggars or 
borrowers, that it is their facility in borrowing that has 
ruined them ; for who will set heartily to work, who has 
the face to ask a comparative stranger for a considerable 
loan, on some plausible and pompous pretext, and walk 
off with it in his pocket ? You might as well, he says, 
suspect a highwayman of addicting himself to hard 
study in the intervals of his profession. Why expr 
surprise at their having run so largely in debt, while 
others continue to lend ? And how is this to be helped, 
when the manner of these sturdy beggars amounts to dra- 
gooning you out of your money ? " If a person has no deli- 
cacy, he has you in his power, for you necessarily feel 
some towards him," and since he will take no denial, com- 
pliance with his peremptory demands follows of course. 

me there are to whom debt seems their natural ele- 
ment, and who, as Jcrrold phrases it, appear to swim 
only in hut water. "To owe and to live are, to them, 
ynonymous ; the ledger is their libro <Toro; the 
call of the sheriff no more than the call of a friend." 

. Trollop the habitual debtor as 

ng and with elastic step, almost enjoying the 

itement of his embarrassments. There is his Mr. 
Sowerby in Fr amley Parsonage : wh iw a el 

on his brow ? It made one almost in love with rui: 

mpany. And his author takes note of ;; 
a remarkable thing with reference to men who, like him, 

are distressed for money, that they never seem at a 1<>-- 

.11 Minis, or deny themse'. e luxuru 

small sums purchase : cabs, dinners, wine, theatres, and 



252 COMFORTABLY DEEP IN DEBT. 

new gloves are always at the command of men who are 
drowned in pecuniary embarrassments, whereas those 
who don't owe a shilling are so often obliged to go with- 
out them. " It would seem that there is no gratification 
so costly as that of keeping out of debt. But then it is 
only fair that, if a man has a hobby, he should pay for 
it." Lord Alvanley's description of a man who muddled 
away his fortune in paying his tradesmen's bills is al- 
most equalled, perhaps surpassed, by the " Tout devoir, 
c'est tout avoir " of Balzac's Des Lupeaulx : " Les 
dettes ! II n'y a pas d'homme fort sans dettes ! Les 
dettes representent des besoins satisfaits," etc. Did his 
debt-difficulties affect Rawdon Crawley's good spirits ? 
Xo, protests the author of Vanity Fair ; every denizen 
of which region must have remarked how well those live 
who are comfortably and thoroughly in debt ; how they 
deny themselves nothing ; how jolly and easy they are 
in their minds. Captain Bellfield in a later story drives 
his creditor, Mr. Cheesacre, into paroxysms of suppressed 
anger at the picnic, by giving directions, and by having 
these directions obeyed : a man to whom he had lent 
twenty pounds the day before yesterday, and who had 
not contributed so much as a bottle of champagne ! 
" One would think he had given it himself — the music 
and the wine and all the rest of it. There are some 
people full of that kind of impudence. How they 
manage to carry it on without ever paying a shilling, I 
never could tell. I know I have to pay my way, and 
something over and beyond generally." For there are 
some people, Elia's division of born lenders, meek and 
mild to a fault, as this world goes, who resemble the 
diffident man in Alexander Smith's household story, who 
used to be afraid to face his debtor — afraid lest he 
should think, if they met in the street, " Here comes 
that fellow Hagart, with his bill in his face," — and so, 



THE BOXDAGE THA T COMES OF BORRO WING, 253 

to avoid him, this soft-hearted creditor dodged about 
circuitous routes : " If I saw my man coming, I bolted 
down the next street, or plunged into an opportune 
entry, or fairly turned on my heel and fled. He was the 
only debtor I ever had, and I was afraid of him. Credit- 
ors don't usually act in that manner — at all events none 
of my creditors ever did. Of course I never got the 
money." Even in Ben Jonson's days the fashionable 
.rine was, " Debt ! why that 's the more for your 
credit ; it 's an excellent policy to owe much in these 
days." The explanation of this good policy given by 
Cordatus in Every Man out of his Humour comprises 
this particular, — that where you are indebted any great 
sum, your creditor observes you with no less regard than 
if he were bound to you for some huge benefit, and will 
quake to give you the least cause of offence, lest he lose 
his money. " I assure you, in these times, no man has 
his servant more obsequious and pliant than gentle- 
men their creditors." This is a paradox, of course ; but 
therein lies the point of it. 

Evi n the friendliest of Clarendon's apologists are fain 
own the depth of his culpability in sanctioning the 
radation of Charles II. into a dependent borrower 

from Loin's XIV. Was it not binding himself over to 
keep the peace ? A bondman's is bated breath. What 

surprised the simple-hearted Vicar of Wakefield mosl 

that unaccountable Mr. Ihirchell was, that although lie- 
was a money-borrower he defended his opinions in their 
philosophical disputes with as much obstinacy as if, 
quoth 1 )octor Primrose, "he had been my patron." Is not 
the borrower the servant of tin- lender,— his slave, his 
ndman ? He who repairs to a tyrant becomes his 

slave, though he set out a fireman, as Pompey said in 
\\v^ leave of his friends, apparently citing the line.'". 

from les : 



254 THE BORROWER A BONDMAN. 

oaris yap a>$ rvpavvov epTropeverai 
Keivov 'ctti 8ov\os Kav eXevdepos poky. 

Be sure of it, says Punch's Complete Letter Writer, 
" the debtor, let him hold up his head and ruffle it as he 
will, is the bondman — the serf of the creditor." Is there 
a worse slavery than debt, asks honest Gunn, in Retired 
from Business : — " galling, hopeless debt ? If my bones 
are free, my spirit 's bound. If this hand 's unchained, 
my soul 's in thraldom." And he murmurs over a certain 
bond as he unfolds it, "What an innocent piece of 
parchment seemed this when I signed it ! and now, to 
my fancy, it looks like the foul skin of a cannibal that 
has eaten man for twenty years." The man out of debt, 
though with a flaw in his jerkin, a crack in his shoe- 
leather, and a hole in his hat, is still the son of liberty 
free as the singing-lark above him ; but " the debtor, 
though clothed in the utmost bravery, what is he but a 
serf set out upon a holiday, a slave to be reclaimed at 
any instant by his owner, the creditor ? " Richardson's 
Lovelace vows that nothing more effectually brings 
down a proud spirit than a sense of lying under pecuni- 
ary obligations. " To be prated to by a bumpkin with 
his hat on, and his arms folded, . . . and you forced 
to take his arch leers and stupid gibes, ... I, who 
think I have a right to break every man's head I pass 
by, if I like not his looks, to bear this ! " Thackeray's 
F. Bayham holds out himself, as well as the Reverend 
Charles Honeyman, as an incarnate caution to that 
"dear youth," Clive Newcome, against the distresses 
(real as well as technical) that come of debt : " Take 
warning by him, dear youth ! By him and by me, if 
you like. See me — me, F. Bayham, descended from the 
ancient kings that long the Tuscan sceptre swayed, 
dodge down a street to get out of sight of a boot shop, 
and my colossal frame tremble if a chap puts his hand 



WHOLESOME HORROR OF DEBT. 255 

on my shoulder, as you did, Pendennis, the other day in 
the Strand, when I thought a straw might have knocked 
me down." Lord Lytton's urgent counsel, emphasized 
with all the force of small capitals, is to nurse, cherish, 
never cavil away, the " wholesome horror of DEBT." 
Personal liberty being the paramount essential to human 
dignity and human happiness, man hazards, he affirms, 
the condition, and loses the virtues, of freedom, in pro- 
portion as he accustoms his thoughts to view, without 
anguish and shame, his lapse into the bondage of debtor. 
•' Debt is to man what the serpent is to the bird ; its 
eye fascinates, its breath poisons, its coil crushes sinew 
cind bone, its jaw is the pitiless grave." " Night and 
, to the ear of a debtor, steal whispers that prompt 
to the deeds of a felon/'' Hazlitt's essay on the Want 
of Money is graphic about the misery of expecting the 
dun's tap at the door, — the uneasy sense of shame at 
the approach of your tormentor, — the ignominy of real 
and sham excuses, — the submission to impertinence, the 
disingenuousness you practise on him and on yourself, the 
degradation in the eyes of others and your own. " Oh, 
it is wretched to have to confront a just and oft-repeated 
demand, and to be without the means to satisfy it, . . . 
to be placed at the power of another, to be indebted to 

his lenity, to stand convicted of having played the knave 
or the fool, and to have no way left to escape contempt 

but by incurring pity." Never exceed thy income,— the 
G Herbert reaches us from the Church- 

. h : 
u By i;" means run in debt : take thine own measui 

Who cannot live on twenty pound a year 

I on 1 rty ; he's a man ft plea 

A kind of thing that's for itself to., d 

Mafoi> monsieur, Mobile's La Fleche tells Cleante, CSUX 

empruntent sont bien m ttilfautessu 



256 DEGRADATION OF DEBT. 

d'etranges choses when one is reduced, like that young 
gentleman, to parley with the money-lenders. Mr. 
Brown the elder assures his nephew and namesake, "Ah, 
Bob, it's hard times with a gentleman, when he has to 
walk round a street for fear of meeting a creditor there, 
and for a man of courage, when he can't look a tailor in 
the face." Bitterly Balzac complains in one place that 
" il faut saluer nos creanciers, les saluer avec grace ; " 
and in another he piles up the agony of hearing the bell 
rung, when the creditor has the handling of it : " Oui, 
pour un homme genereux, une dette est l'enfer . . . 
Une dette impayee est la bassesse, un commencement 
de friponnerie, et pis que tout cela, un mensonge ! elle 
ebauche des crimes," etc. The original of Byron's 
Werner, Miss Lee's Kru.itzner, — in a tale, by some good 
judges (De Quincey for one) accounted superior to the 
play founded upon it, — on finding himself a debtor, be- 
came suddenly alive to a new and undefined misery, 
of which, amid all his calamities, he had hitherto been 
ignorant : " Impoverished indeed, but no man's slave, 
for he was then no man's debtor ; personal insult or 
degradation, in any personal shape, he had never yet 
known." Mr. Trollope is realistic enough on the misery 
of waiting in dingy rooms, which look on to bare walls, 
" in the City," and are approached through some Hook 
Court ; or of keeping appointments at a low coffee- 
house, to which trystings the money-lender will not 
trouble himself to come unless it pleases him ; of being 
civil, almost suppliant, to a cunning knave whom the 
borrower loathes ; of submitting to vulgarity of the foul- 
est kind, and having to seem to like it ; of being 
badgered, reviled, and at last accused of want of honesty 
by the most fraudulent of mankind. Wise and weighty 
were those words addressed by Johnson to Boswell by 
letter : " Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only 



DEMORALIZED BY DEBT. 257 

as an inconvenience ; you will find it a calamity." This 
was just before Boswell lost his father, Lord Auchinleck ; 
and just after the loss, we find the new laird again cau- 
tioned and counselled by the old sage, who exhorts him 
not to think his estate his own, while any man can call 
upon him for money which he cannot pay : let him there- 
fore begin with even "timorous parsimony ;" and let it 
be his first care not to be in any man's debt. The bor- 
rower is the bondman of the lender. Colonel Xewcome 
bids his boy mark the degradation through debt of their 
reverend friend, the popular incumbent of Lady Whittle- 
sea's ; let him note to what straits debt brings a man, — 
to tamper with truth, to have to cheat the poor. "Think 
of flying before a washerwoman, or humbling yourself 
to a tailor, or eating a poor man's children's bread ! " 
Sir Henry Taylor asserts that nothing breaks down a 
- truthfulness mure surely than pecuniary embar- 
ment,— - 

unthrift was a liar from all time ; 
Never was debtor that was not deceiver.*' 

Borrowing he calls one of the must ordinary ways in 
which weak men sacrifice the future to the present, 
whence it is that the gratitude for a loan i.^ SO proverb- 
ially evanescent ; for the future, becoming present in its 
turn, will not be well pleased with those who have 
1 in doing it an injury. By conspiring with your 
the author of Notes from Life puts it, to tie- 
fraud his future self, you naturally incur his future dis- 
ire. Take to heart, therefore, the admonition of 
the ancient courtier : — 

tlier a borrower nor a lender 

■ 1m. in oft loseth both hs< If and fi iend, 
ills the edge of husbandry 

Mr. Disraeli has -aid, that if youth but knew tin 
misery they are entailing on thei the moment 



258 DEGRADATIOX OF THE DEBTOR. 

they accept a pecuniar}- credit to which they are not 
entitled, " how they would start in their career ! how pale 
they would turn ! how they would tremble, and clasp 
their hands in agony at the precipice on which they are 
disporting ! " He calls debt the prolific mother of folly 
and of crime, — tainting the course of life in all its 
dreams. With a small beginning it has a giant's growth 
and strength ; and when we make the monster, Franken- 
stein-like, we make our master, who haunts us at all 
hours, and shakes his whip of scorpions for ever in our 
sight. " The slave hath no overseer so severe. Faustus, 
when he signed the bond with blood, did not secure a 
doom more terrific." In the estimate of Dr. Paulus, 
debt is something so degrading, so harassing, so shack- 
ling to the freedom of a man, that he can understand no 
one obtaining the least thing on credit, necessary- or un- 
necessary, without forfeiting all self-respect and peace 
of mind. " Dans notre famille," says Leopold Robert, 
" nous avons tous ete eleves avec des principes qui nous 
font envisager avec la plus grande frayeur de contracter 
des obligations que tant de circonstances pouvent 
empecher de remplir. Xous entendions dire sans cesse 
qu'il valait mieux vivre de peu, et de tres-peu meme, que 
de risquer par une ambition trop grande de se donner 
des chagrins qui peu vent durer toujours." The narrow no- 
tions about debt, held by the old-fashioned Tullivers. may 
perhaps, as George Eliot ironically apologizes on their be- 
half, excite a smile on the faces of many readers in these 
days of wide commercial views and wide philosophy, 
according to which everything rights itself without any 
trouble of ours : the fact that my tradesman is out of 
pocket by me, is to be looked at through the serene cer- 
tainty that somebody else's tradesman is in pocket by 
somebody else ; and since there must be bad debts in the 
world, why, it is mere egoism not to like that we in par- 



HEALTHY HORROR OF Bl DEBT. 

ticular should make them instead of our fellow- c 
Burns assured a London correspondent i 

. jhorred as hell " the idea of - 
in a corner to avoid a dun, and that this made hi: 
strict economi irteen yc r he was an u 

applicant for small loans — his health and strength 
spirits quite broken — i th the 

impending " horrors of a jail." R piqued him- 

self in his poverty on this one f pride : M Jc 

jamais su faire dc et j'ai toujours mieux 

-ouffrir que devx 5 much i- 

Jacques that one knows not where to have him ; but 
examples of genuine and consistent dread of debt occur 
to the memc on ) multiform an or present 

use. 

That jnificant entry in John Evelyn's Dia 

June 19. 1 I paid all my debts to a far- 

One of Shenstone's paragraph 
with the note . '.amatior.. 

pleasure it is to pay one's debts! " — and he 

line purpose. The pleasure he :. 
removal of that u: 
and ol - ; to th 

ing in affording pi to the promot- 

ing of future confider. iie cons,- 

of or. - know 

to be 
. 

th of n 

butcher. I gran: 

modern nobility, but cure the 

educaJ ~ 

• me of her 
squanderer until 1 be- 



260 SENSITIVELY SCRUPULOUS AS TO DEBT. 

came frightened once for all by the large bills run up 
with tradesmen who enticed her into their debt ; and now 
beginning to " reflect upon her own folly, she was never at 
rest until she had discharged all her shop-bills," etc. Some 
scrupulous souls carry to an extreme their scrupulosity 
in this respect. Of the late Mr. Welby Pugin we are 
told, that having once had to endure, in early life, the 
constraints of a sponging-house, he determined never 
thenceforth to owe a shilling, and ever afterwards paid 
his bills weekly, if not upon delivery of the articles ; 
and so inveterate became the habit in after life, that 
in making excursions from Cambridge with university 
friends to different churches in the neighbourhood, he 
would never wait till the close of the day to share ex- 
penses, but insisted, often very inconveniently, on paying 
his proportion of each petty disbursement as it occurred. 
Those who, and they are many, imagine that Leigh 
Hunt was indifferent to his pecuniary obligations, are 
said by his biographer to invert in the most curious man- 
ner the real state of the case : "He was so incessantly 
haunted by them, so over-anxious to fulfil all that was 
due from him, that he often paralysed his own powers." 
The Abbe de Bernis is noted as one who, while he never 
wished or cared to save, " could not bear the idea of 
debt." Not that we can suppose so comfortable a per- 
sonage to have ever emulated the life or death of the 
silent pauper in Crabbe's Tales of the Hall : 

" The sickening man— for such appeared the fact — 
Just in his need, would not a debt contract ; 
But left his poor apartment for the bed 
That earth might yield him, or some wayside shed ; 
Here he was found, and to this place conveyed, 
Where he might rest, and his last debt be paid." 



XXIV. 
AS VINEGAR UPON NITRE. 

Proverbs xxv. 20. 

WHATEVER maybe the exact import, chemically 
speaking, of the simile "As vinegar upon nitre,*' 
it is sufficiently suggestive as a comparison of him 
"that singeth songs to a heavy heart." Corroding; acid 
is the agent in question — a something that sets the 
teeth on ^\^c, that makes the eyes smart, that makes 
the heavy heart all the heavier, the sad heart all the 
sadder. A word in season, how good is it ! A song 
out of season, how bad is it ! Light hearts may think to 
gladden heavy ones with a carol of airy glee, and their 
warbling may be well-meant ; but if the heart they sing 

out of tune, out of tune will sound their daintiest 
carollin; 

I only to vinegar upon nitre is he compared that 
singeth songs to a heavy heart, but also to one thai 
taketh away a garment in cold weather ; and of the two 
similes Coleridge admires the latter, as exquisitely 
beautiful and touching ; while the former, though less 
pleasing to the imagination, he commends as having the 
charm of propriety, and expressing the transition with 
equal force and liveliness. A grief of recent birth he 

If compares to ,1 sick infant that must have i;.^ 

medicine administered in its milk, and sad thoughts are 
•ITOwful heart's natural food. "A man who is full 

of inward heavin irchbishop Lelghton, "the 

he is encoiii iDOUt with mirth, it exasperates 

and enrages his grief the more; like ineffectual weak 

physic, which removes QOt the humour, but stirs it and 



262 'YE'LL BREAK MY HEART, YE LITTLE BIRDS: 

makes it more unquiet." This is a complaint which, as 
the author of Aids to Reflection demonstrates, is not to 
be cured by opposites, which for the most part only 
reverse the symptoms while they exasperate the disease. 
" The soul in her desolation hugs the sorrow close to 
her, as her sole remaining garment ; and this must be 
drawn off so gradually, and the garment to be put in its 
stead so gradually slipped on, and feel so like the former, 
that the sufferer shall be sensible of the change only by 
the refreshment." The true spirit of consolation, we are 
admonished, is well content to detain the tear in the eye, 
and finds a surer pledge of its success in the smile of 
resignation that dawns through that, than in the liveliest 
shows of a forced and alien exhilaration. 

Shakspeare writes of one deep-drenched in a sea of 
care, — 

" The little birds, that tune their morning's joy, 
Make her moans mad with their sweet melody : 
For mirth doth search the bottom of annoy ; 
Sad souls are slain in merry company." 

On the banks and braes of bonny Doon the little birds 
are reproachfully asked how they sing so cheerily to one 
11 sae weary fu' o' care," and are told they'll break the 
heart of the listener with their wanton glee. The theme 
was one for which Burns again and again wrote varia- 
tions. As in My Nannies awe? : 

" Thou laverock that springs frae the dews o' the lawn, 
The shepherd to warn o' the grey-breaking dawn, 
And thou mellow mavis that hails the nightfa', 
Give over for pity ! " 

So in Craigiebum-wood : he hears the wild birds singing, 
but it is pain and grief to a weary wight, with care his 
bosom wringing. So again in his Address to the Wood- 
lark : " For pity's sake, sweet bird, nae mair, or my poor 



SOXGS 77 D HEART. 

heart is broken ! " Wordsworth's impassioned stanzas, 
begin: -aid that some have died for Love, 

occur to mar. g ird of the appeal, — 

■>u thrush, thcr. ud — and loud and free, 

.3 yon row of alders liit:. . . . 
.ng another song, or choose another tree " — 

rbed the sorrower till the sound 
more than he could bear. > perhaps will a 

Eje in the E ptive of small birds 

singing happily to mates happy as they : 

•• With spirit-saddening po- 

e throug. ?ods ; but those blithe notes 

Strike the dt: the heart : I sj 

Of ■ .d what we fee. 

The author of Old town Folks pictures a pensive 
maiden sitting down by the window, thoughtful an 
and listening to the crickets, wh ^norant jollity 

often sounds as mournfully to us mortals as ours may to 
superior I There the little hoarse black wretches 

were scraping and creaking, as if life and death were 
:ed solely for their pleasure, and the world were 
created only to give them a good time in it ;" — and in a 
later chapter, the o, warbling an earnest 

and plaintive hymn--. —jjing 

match by a robin who perches himself hard by in the 

Lings— the merry 
fthebir the throat with 

::gular contrast with the 

. life. On the 
more • ' another book firom the same pen, 

a tale of the dismal swamp, we read how nothing 
I for awhile but the warbling of the bir. i 

ant of the abyss o( cruelty and crime 
which they sung."' We watch the her 
I the bi: 



264 BIANCA AND THE NIGHTINGALES. 

by the great wail of human sorrow." In vain the 

frequent appeal of poets and poetesses to this effect — 

" I prithee, cease thy song ! for from my heart 
Thou hast made memory's bitter waters start, 
And filled my weary eyes with the soul's rain." 

Or this, of a transatlantic bard, who utters it in the 
guise of a formal Complaint : — 

" Birds of song and beauty, lo, I charge you all with blame : — 
I can borrow for my sorrow nothing that avails 
From your lonely note, that only speaks of joy that never fails." 

One of Mrs. Browning's latest and most characteristic 
poems, is Bianca among the Nightingales, with its refrain 
of " These nightingales will sing me mad ! The nightin- 
gales, the nightingales." They torture and deride, 
Bianca complains : " I cannot bear these nightingales 

. . . They'll sing and stun me in the tomb — the 
nightingales, the nightingales ! " The swallow is simi- 
larly apostrophized by Owen Meredith : " Thou comest 
to mock me with remembered things ; I love thee not, 
O bird for me too gay." Of another spirit is the poor 
imprisoned gaberlunzie, Edie Ochiltree, when the sun- 
beams shine fair on the rusty bars of his grated 
dungeon, and a miserable linnet, whose cage some caged 
debtor had obtained permission to attach to the window, 
begins to greet him with song. " Ye're in better spirits 
than I am," quoth Edie to the bird, " for I can neither 
whistle nor sing for thinking o' the bonnie burnsides 
and green shaws that I should have been dandering 
beside in weather like this/' It is before the Cousin 
Phillis of Mrs. Gaskell's pretty pastoral story becomes 
sad-hearted, with good reason, that she cultivates the art 
of warbling in imitation and in emulation of the birds — 
" really gurgled, and whistled, and warbled, just as they 
did, out of the very fulness and joy of her heart." All 
too soon their merry music becomes to her a thing to be 



'AS VINEGAR UPON NITRE.* 265 

deprecated, not mimicked ; when her feelings would 
rather be those of Mary in The Gates Ajar, exclaiming 
" I hate the blue-birds flashing in and out of the carmine 
cloud that the maple makes, and singing, singing, every- 
where," and finding it all too easy to understand how 
Bianca heard " the nightingales sing through her head," 
and how she could call them "owl-like birds" that sang 
" for S] mg " for hate," sang " for doom." So with 

lalen in No Name, looking up at the far faint blue 
of the sky: "She heard the joyous singing of birds 
among the ivy that clothed the ruins. Oh, the cold 
distance of the heavens! Oh, the pitiless happiness 
of the birds ! " .And so with George Eliot's Caterina, 
when the birds were chirping and trilling their new- 
autumnal songs so joyously, and she moved through all 
this woodland joy like a poor wounded leveret painfully 
ing its little body through the sweet clover-tufts — 
for it, sweet in vain. The case is altered when the bird, 
by poetic licence, attunes her strain to the mood of the 
ly mourner, and is as melancholy as melancholy 
heart could wish ; as with Spenser's squire and turtlc- 
: — 

" Shec sitting by him, as on ground he lay, 
Her mourneful] notes full piteously did frame. 
And thereof made a lamentable lay; 

. . . and with her mourneful] muse 
Him to recomfort in his greatest care, 

I much did ease bis mourning and misfare." 

But why should song-birds all our spa 

out of season are from human throats, however 

dulcet tin: wind-pipe, to them that 1 at heart, as 

lt upon nitre. "Silence thai harsh musi 

Sforza's injunction, in Ma I hike of Milan, when 

bad n Suddenly made har-h what M weet 

before : — 



266 THE CURSE CAUSELESS. 

" Silence that harsh music ; 
'Tis now unseasonable : a tolling bell, 
As a sad harbinger to tell me that 
This pampered lump of flesh must feed the worms, 
Is fitter for me. — 1 am sick." 

Landor's dejected queen, in Giovanna of Naples, rebukes 
her companion's sprightliness with the assurance, 

" Nothing on this earth so wounds 

The stricken bosom, as such sportiveness, 
Or weighs worn spirits down like levity." 

As a much older writer has it, in the Mirr our for Magis- 
trates, as for trying — 

" To move the sad a pleasant tale to heere, 
Your time is lost, and you no whit the neere." 

Beranger assumed a very great deal when he de- 
clared himself an exception to his kind, — and the sort 
of exception only to prove the rule, — 

" Mais je possede une gaiete 
Qui n'offense point la tristesse." 



XXV. 

THE CURSE CAUSELESS. 

Proverbs xxvi. 2. 

HOW should Balaam curse whom God had not 
cursed ? " The curse causeless shall not come." 
But King David checked the sons of Zeruiah, that 
would fain stop the cursings of Shimei, the son of Gera. 
" So let him curse, because the Lord hath said unto 
him, Curse David. . . . Let him alone, and let him 
curse ; for the Lord hath bidden him/' For all that, 
David cherished a hope that the Lord would look upon 
him in his affliction — thus afflicted, thus accursed — and 
would requite him good for Shimer's cursing, that day. 



IMPOTEXT IMPRECATIOA 267 

The homely adage has it, that curses, like chickens, 
come home to roost. 

Una, in Spenser's Faerie Qtuetu is pursued with ana- 
themas by the sightless hag who thinks to owe her a 
grudge, and who is instant in imprecations that plagues 
and mischief and long misery may fall on her, and follow 
all the way, and that in endless error she may ever 
stray. 

I when she saw her prayers nought prevaile, 
She backe retourned with some labour lost.*' 

Shi: brother is overwhelmed with distress 

at his infuriate sire's invocation of a too hasty ana- 
thema : "His curse ; dost comprehend what that word 
carries, shot from a father's angry breath ?" But 
casuistry is not devoid of comfort in such cases, where 
spleen is the motive power. " Can he be blest," asks 
Titus, in Howard Payne's tragedy, "on whom a father's 
direful curse shall fall ?" The answer given is : — 

. madman's imprecation is no curse."* 

Without a cause, it shall be without effect ; having no 

to show, it shall have none of the virtue of a cause 

.me out of nothing, and nothing shall come 

of it. Vet can an atrocious Cenci believe, or pretend to 

believe, that his imprecations have found a gracious 

mpliance : — 

• There is something of reason, rent wit, in 

'aere's Cleante, when his furibumi I 
him with a u wne ma malddi 

llpfa Nickle- 
by bre. my bitter d 

Whence will c : com- 

mand?" is the nephew's retort; u «»r wh.it 

I man lik I I "arlm-f.ml 

simply says of the b with which M 

Barba: . these are not melodramatic days, it did the culprit 

no possible ha 



268 CURSES THAT COME HOME TO ROOST. 

" 'Tis plain I have been favoured from above, 
For when I cursed my sons, they died." 

In another work of Shelley's we have a recognition of 
curses not causeless that have come whither they were 
meant : 

" Pity, not scorn, I felt, though desolate 
The desolator now, and unaware 
The curses which he mocked had caught him by the hair." 

But the execrable Count Francesco is complacent in 
the theory and practice of execration. He is convinced 
of his right, and without stint or scruple exercises it. It 
is his daughter's turn now : 

" The world's Father 

Must grant a parent's prayer against his child, 
Be he who asks even what men call me. 
Will not the deaths of her rebellious brothers 
Awe her before I speak ? For I on them 
Did imprecate quick ruin, and it came." 

He laughs to scorn Lucretia's entreaty that he unsay 
his dreadful words of execration, — for his own sake to 
unsay them, for "when high God grants, He punishes 
such prayers." His delight was in cursing, saith the 
psalmist, and it shall happen unto him : he clothed him- 
self with cursing, like as with a raiment, and it shall be 
unto him as the cloak that he hath upon him, and as 
the girdle that he is alway girded withal. " Though 
they curse, yet bless Thou," is a prayer, and a rational 
as well as a devout one. It may perhaps be said of 
curses as of Pax vobiscum in the gospels, where " Peace 
be to this house ! " is said to avail if the bon of peace 
be there : " if not, it shall turn to you again." So, if no 
meet object of execration be found, the curse shall turn 
to the curser again ; not be lost, or wasted, but light on 
his own head. 

The curse of the Holy Father is not always infallible, 



FALLIBLE PAPAL EXECRA1 269 

whatever himself may be. Pope Innocent III. de- 
nounced against Alfonso, King of Leon, for marrying 

thin the prohibited degrees, a still severer infliction of 
Divine vengeance than had befallen Isabella, whose two 
husbands, Conrad of Montferrat and Henry of Cham- 
pagne, u God had smitten with death/' " The 
vaticin. . Dean Milman, " was singuL 

unfortunate : the son of this un :nion grew up a 

king of the m rtue, and pr - 

perity ; and after his death the canonized Ferdinand 
- d into the — 

Remarking upon the angry- excitement produced in 
German)- of late by the maledictory Allocution of 
Pope, one of our foremost journalists showed how we in 

^land have, in our day, been cursed, and interdict 
and excommunicated by the reigning Pope of the time 
in e rm of execration known to employers of 

ecc J Latin; and how we nevertheless on 

our I exact'. pleaded, ignored the Pope 

and I s of things human and divine, and used the 

power of the State as we th ; the con - 

quence beir .tonqi: >rtably v. 

.nd that no Popethi: 

in the - 
mind if he did. "The It eir 

credit, have acted exact 
bee 
have got so us that the P 

must have 1 
by the reception which his eloquence met with in 

finding that he had ene: 

middle Co;;- en to I 

the: cursed I >pe : — either, when a 



IMP TEXT IMPRECATIONS. 



he speaks with divine authority, and then his rebukes 
ought to be accepted with humble contrition ; or he 
does but utter the sentiments of an amiable but irritable 
Italian gentleman, and then his curses are not more 
worth regarding than if they came from the lips of a 
Roman marquis. Observers of times and seasons, a 
Saturday Reviewer remarked in 1863, must even then be 
beginning to suspect that the cause of Victor Emmanuel 
was after all likely to thrive, and that three or four years 
of quiet possession might probably throw a doubt on the 
validity or efficacy of the most furious Papal curses. 

Shenstone sententiously affirms in one of his essa}-s, 
that if any one's curse can effect damnation, it is not 
that of the Pope, but that of the poor. 

Noli (zmuiari is the theme and the title of a little 
poem of Arthur Hugh Clough's in deprecation of impre- 
catory controversialists, all and sundry : — 

;i What though, in blood their souls embruing, 
The great, the good and wise they curse, 
Still sinning, what they know not doing ; 
Stand still, forbear, nor make it worse. 

" By curses, by denunciation, 

The coming fate they cannot stay ; 
Xor thou, by fiery indignation, 
Though just, accelerate the day.'"' 

Jeremy Taylor has this to say of cursing, in his 
sermon on flatten*, — that although the causeless curse 
shall return upon the tongue that spake it, yet, because 
very often there is a fault on both sides, when there is 
reviling or cursing on either, the danger of a cursing 
tongue is highly to be declined, as the biting of a mad 
dog or the tongue of a smitten serpent. And in another 
discourse the same great preacher adverts to the quarrel 
between Chrysostom and Epiphanius, saints both, when 
" Epiphanius wished that St. Chrysostom might not die 
a bishop ; and he, in a peevish exchange, wished that 



THE CURSE CAUSELESS, 271 

Epiphanius might never return to his bishopric : when 
they had forgotten their foolish anger, God remembered 
it, and said 'Amen ' to both their cursed speakings.''' 

Curses causeless are deprecated by Walter Shandy as 
so much waste of our strength and soul's health to no 
manner of purpose. " ' They are like sparrowshot,' 
quoth my Uncle Toby, 'fired against a bastion.' 
' They serve,' continues the other, ' to stir the humours, 
but carry oft" none of their acrimony. 1 " The Duchess of 
Malfi, in Webster's darksome drama, exchanges her 
resolve, " I will go pray," for a wild and whirling im- 
pulse, " No, I'll go curse." " I could curse the stars," 
she exclaims in her frenzy, "and the smiling seasons of 
the year into a Russian winter ; nay, the world to its 
first chaos." Curse the stars ? A bystander points 
upward — for it is night-time — and bids her mark, de- 
spite her anathema, " Look you, the stars shine still." 
Not to be baffled, the unhappy raver replies : "Oh, but 
you must remember, my curse hath a great way to go." 
From other of our old dramatists might be cited parallel 
passages in illustration of the text. Friar Bacon, in 
Robert Greene's Honourable History (1594), dismisses 
his serving-man, Miles, from his service, 

" with :i fatal CUrse, 

That direful plague and mischief fall on thi 

Miles, "I i-> no matter; I am against yon with the old proverb 

'I'h.- more the fox is cursed, the better hr f.i: 

A single play of Shakspeare's — King Richard III. 

— abounds in passages to the purp- where, t<> 

Queen Margarel excluding Buckingham from the com- 
of her curse, the duke replies by excluding all his 
companion \ too ; 

" for curses never p 

'i he li|>^ of those that breathe them in tin- air 

Ml not believe but they ascend tin 
And there a* 



272 IMP TEXT IMPRECATIONS. 

The queen is an adept in cursing, and is over and 
over again reminded how fatally her curses have come 
home to her, as well as those invoked upon her by em- 
bittered foes. Interrupted in one instance by Gloster — 
" Oh, let me make the period to my curse " — she cries : 

" Gloster.-^- Tis done by me, and ends in Margaret. 
Queen Elizabeth. — Thus have you breathed your curse against 

yourself.'*' 

" Can curses pierce the clouds and enter heaven ?** 
she had exclaimed just before ; " Why, then, give place, 
dull clouds, to my quick curses." As the tragedy works 
out its gloomy way, those whom she has cursed, not 
causelessly, believe they recognize in their varied doom 
the effect of her imprecations. Long before her decline 
and fall she had, by her violence, moved Suffolk to re- 
monstrate, " Cease, gentle queen, these execrations." 
But she taunts him with womanish cowardice in not 
joining in her strain. Has he not spirit to curse his 
enemies ? Plenty, it seems* were there any use in it ; 
but that is just what he cannot see. He would curse 
away, with a will, and without end, could he but believe 
the curses would tell home. But he knows they will 
not. What are such curses but lost breath ? And, thus 
vented, wasting their bitterness on the desert air, they 
betoken not merely lost breath, but, to all intents and 
purposes, a lost soul. 

* Curse he does, afterwards, to show that he can. And with 
such vehemence and such fertility he does it, that she who 
prompted him shudders and entreats him to pause ; for, 

" these dread curses, like the sun 'gainst glass, 

Or like an overcharged gun, recoil, 

And turn the force of them upon thyself." 

Second Part of King Henry VI, Act iii., Sc. 2. Cf. King 
Richard III, Act i., Sc. 3, passim ; Act iii., Sc. 3 ; Act iv., Sc. 1 

and 4 ; Act v., Sc. 1. 



XXVI. 
MEDDLER'S MISCHANCE. 
Proverbs xxvi. 17. 

HE that passeth by and mcddlcth with strife be- 
longing not to him, is likened in the Book of 
: rbs to one that taketh a dog by the ears. The 
meddlesome Marplots o( daily life, assiduously officious 
and blunderingly busy, — the busybodies in other men's 
matters, against whom an apostle directs a sharp sen- 
tence of warning and rebuke, — are disposed of as they 
deserve in the moral of one of La Fontaine's Fables : 

•• Ainsi ccrtaincs gens, faisant les empresses, 
S'introduisent dans les affaires : 
lis font partout les necessaires, 
Kt, partout importuns, devraient ctre chassis." 

But there are well-meaning meddlers, whose meddling 
involves them in mischance. To interpose between a 
Contentious couple, who by wedlock are one, IS notori- 
ously a hazardous enterpri e. Assize cases and police 

report- are often cited to show what may be expected 
by those who interfere between man and wife — namely, 

the joint hostility of the two. Typical enough is the 
instance of the wife who, in terror for her life from her 

husband's violence, sent for the police, and they for a 

r, the man being in a stale of delirium tremens: 
the doctor came, and did what he thought nea ui\ ; 

and when the patient had recovered, his wile joined him 

in resenting the uncalled-for interposition of strangers, 
and flatly denying any real 1 .mi te or pretext for it. 
1 [on est Arthur ( 1 bat stanch friend of Raleigh's, 

Only found the way of the world an odd one, not an 

uncommon cue, when, seeing Sir Walter and Sir (• 

1 



274 MOLIERTS WOODCUTTER AXE HIS WIFE. 

Care" " " brawl and scramble 'ike madmen," he played the 
part of him who taketh a dog by the ears, for he pur- 
chased, as he describes it, "such a rap on the knuckles, 
that I wished both their pates broken, and with much 
ado they stayed their brawl to see my bloody fingers," 
and then set to work to abuse the hapless peacemaker. 
Not always, not altogether, blessed is the peacemaker, so 
far as this world goes, and the way of this world. 

Sganarelle and Martine in Le Medecin malg 
the liveliest exemplars on record, perhaps, of the cha- 
racteristic that here claims our notice. The woodcutter 
is exasperated by the volley of bad names his -drag? ;:" 
a wife discharges at him — "traitre! trompeur! lache ! 
coquin ! pendard ! gueux ! fripon ! maraud! voleui 
etc., etc. She will have it. will she, then? he says 
he lifts the stick to her: "Ah'! vous en voulez done? 
[Sganarelle prend nn baton, et bat sa femme^ BC 
Robert hears the cries of the beaten vixen, and hurries 
:: the rescue. Hold ! kotiki liola ! Fie upon it ! What 
is all this ? Cudgel a woman ! Infamous ! He will 
teach the scoundrel to know better. — But Martine is 
beforehand with Sganarelle in resenting the interference. 
What business is it oi M. Robert's ? She chc ises to be 
beaten, " Je veux cu'il me batte. moi ! — De quoi vous 
melez-vous ? Es:-ce la votre arraire ? — Yoyez un peu 
cet impertinent, qui veut empecher les maris de battre 
leurs femmes!" M. Robert is full of conciliator}- inter- 
jections of acquiescence, and defers absolutely to the 
lady's view of the case ; but her wrath waxes hotter 
and hotter with even- concession. Why should he 
thrust in his nose ? Let him mind his own business. 
She likes to be beater.. It is not at M. Robert's 
expense : i: costs '::m nothing : then why should he be 

shing himself forward where he's not wanted ? He's 
a fool, she tells him flat for meddling in what don't 



MAKING A MUDDLE OF MEDDLIXG. 

concern him one bit ; and with a box on the ear she 
enforces her argument, a soufflct that may well stagger 
the intruder. M. Robert thereupon begs her husband's 
pardon with all his heart, and bids him beat, drub, 
cudgel, thrash, castigate his wife as much as he likes : 
for the matter of that, M. Robert will help him, if he 

s it. This brings the husband to the fore. No, it 
is not his wish. He will beat her if he likes, and he 
won't beat her if he don't like ; but he won't be dictated 
to, or interfered with. She is his, Sganarelle's, wife, not 
M. Robert's. M. Robert has no voice in the matter at 
all. Sganarelle don't want his help. And M. Robert 
is simply an impertinent ass in meddling with other 
folks' private matters ; which having said, Sganarelle 

the meddler a good beating, and sends him flying, 
as if for dear life. 

■lanti, in the Legend of Florence, gives Rondinelli 
a piece of his mind, in more polished terms, but in a 

similar spirit to that of Moliere's woodcutter and 
wife-beater : 

" I laugh at you. 

let mc tell you at parting, that the way 

• a lady best, and have her faults 
iiest admonished by her lawful helper, 

thrust a lawless vanity 
bet him and his vexed lo-. 

Captain Marryat's autobiographic Stapleton records 

his c<»mi- f f<>r standing up for a beaten wife, 

it up with ber assailant, joins him in 

turniiv.; on the mediator, whom they jointly bid pack 

off, and never show his fei tin. Cooper's 

I ish, in the Prairie, invites and U mpa- 

thv with wife, but 

i the too ready sympathizer, and such 

in a thi to set 



276 MEDDLER'S MISCHANCE. 

up as a judge, and wrongs a man she won't hear a word 
against — fluent and affluent and effluent of such words 
as the termagant wife may be herself. When the 
Country Fellow in Philaster comes upon the hero in the 
act of wounding Arethusa in the forest, and with a cry 
of shame on the " dastard," is for spoiling his sport, 
" What ill-bred man art thou, to intrude thyself?" is all 
the thanks he gets on the sufferer's part, to say nothing 
of the keen edge of Philaster's drawn sword. Montes- 
quieu, in his Persian Letters, expatiates on the love the 
Muscovite women have to be beaten by their husbands, 
whose hearts they doubt of having really secured, unless 
by palpable proofs on their persons in black and blue. 
" Je crois que si quelque voisin venoit au secours, je 
l'etranglerois," one of them declares. The sensitiveness 
of the stronger vessel in such cases of a little domestic 
difficulty, where however the grey mare is the better 
horse, is exemplified in an epigram of Dean Swift's : — 

" As Thomas was cudgelled one day by his wife, 
He took to the street, and fled for his life : 
Tom's three dearest friends came by in the squabble, 
And saved him at once from the shrew and the rabble ; 
Then ventured to give him some sober advice — 
But Tom is a person of honour so nice, 
Too wise to take counsel, too proud to take warning, 
That he sent to all three a challenge next morning. 
Three duels he fought, thrice ventured his life ; 
Went home, and was cudgelled again by his wife." 

The three friends at least ventured each of their three 
lives too ; and probably went home mindful of the pro- 
verb that he that passeth by and meddleth with strife 
belonging not to him, is like one that taketh a dog by 
the ears. In this case a mad dog, or something like it ; 
a sad dog, at any rate, and one whose bark was not worse 
than his bite, for he proved himself just as ready to bite 
as to bark. 



SPORTIVE MISCHIEF. 



Cold and selfish prudence is only too willing to abide 
by the teaching of the proverb, and make a practical 
application of it perpetual, to their own comfort and 
security. But there are times when the dog must be 
taken by the cars, and defied to do his worst. Meddlers 
are liable to mischances, but a magnanimous spirit will 
not accept them as a veto on all intervention. Moses, man 
of God, seeing two of his brethren strive together, would 
have set them at one again, but was rebuffed by the 
wrong-doer, who thrust him away, saying, " Who made 
thee a ruler and a judge over us ?" The rebuff was 
followed by a reminder that made Moses flee. Else he 
was not the man to flee at a rebuff. It is the priest of a 
.-led type, it is the levite of a lukewarm faith and 
selfish life, that, seeing the wounded man, and smelling 
strife, and suspecting the vicinity of the violent, declines 
to meddle with what (let him hope) belongeth not to 
him (let good Samaritans meddle and make as they 
and .so passeth by on the other side. 



XXVII. 
SPORTIVE MISCHI1 

PR< 1\ . i. 19. 

A an who casteth firebrands, arrows, and 

th, SO, in the ethics of the Book of Proverbs, " i < 

th his neighbour, and saith, Am 
■ icaJ jokes comic into this 
tically, they are no jokes. Let a bear robbed of her 

whel] r than sucfa a fool in his folly. 

Smollett ; | and unacOOlint- 

'i which prompl as, otherwise 

EllCt and perplex their 



278 PRACTICAL JOKERS EXTRAORDINARY 

fellow-creatures in this way ; but his fictions give un- 
welcome prominence to feats of the kind, wrought by 
his Peregrine Pickles and their like ; and hence a part 
of their popularity with boisterous youth, whose animal 
spirits are yet above par, and their rational development 
considerably below it. Theodore Hook, himself at one 
.time an egregious artist in the degrading art, could 
moralize in mature age on the " frequent serious effects 
of practical jokes," and in the Daly of his Gilbert Gurney 
he took pains to u expose " at length the pranks and 
absurdities of what the Chinese would call a first-chop 
performer in the line. " Mr, Daly, however, escaped with- 
out doing any very serious mischief to anybody but 
himself ; and so the retribution was satisfactory, and the 
fool's bolt once shot, the fool himself was obliged to 
bolt at last." But the author's lingering zest for such 
performances is obvious in his book ; he may satirize 
and show up the performers, but he is interested in them 
— whether it be a Stephen Sutterthwaite, the sort of 
fellow who could pull your chair from under you, just as 
you were going to sit down, and " what fun !" when you 
came with your head right against a steel fender or a 
marble chimney-piece ; or that Duke of Montague of the 
last century, whose passion for practical jokes upon a great 
scale was so inordinate ; or, "a noble earl, not many 
years dead," who, in order to divert himself and two or 
three chosen friends at another's expense, used sometimes 
to invite to dine with him six stammerers and stutterers, 
or three men six feet four high and three men scarcely 
four feet six, or a half-dozen sufferers from some nervous 
affection, of the St. Vitus's dance order, wherewith to 
make merry on system. The fictions of Mr. Albert 
Smith were still more replete with samples of the pro- 
nounced practical joker, mostly cads of the most in- 
curable sort, gents whom none but gents could put up 



IN FICTIOX AXD IN REAL LIFE. 279 

with in life, or care to read about in monthly magazines. 
His Mr. Jollit in one story is not very much the social 
superior of his Skittler in another — that Skittler who 
dealt in detonating balls to explode at the feet of old 
ladies, and Waterloo crackers to pull at the ears of old 
gentlemen, and ginger bread nuts made of cayenne pep- 
per; and there is again his medical student, Mr. Barnes, 
chiefly remarkable for playing rude tricks, as a clown 
might be I to do, in private life, and who never 

lost an opportunity, nor did the same thing twice, 
" which distinguished him from funny people generally." 
Sheridan lived in a day when the art and practice of 
elaborate practical jukes were better appreciated than 
and he piqued himself on his skill as an amateur, 
and won whatever kudos such perpetrations might de- 
serve, by strewing the hall with plates and dishes, and 
knives and forks stuck between them, and then tempting 
Tickell (with whom, says Moore, he was always at some 
frolic or other; to pursue him into the thick of them, 
where the victim duly fell, and was almost cut to pieces. 
Sheridan, by R account, was always at these tricks 

Ultry houses. "He has been known to send a 
man and horse eight miles for a piece of crape, and 

• were always kept in expectation of some forth- 

indeed in Boeotian dulness 

the country house be, or have been, that could be 

tained b) ir-fetching and far-fetched 

kind. ::i the denizens of a common gaol it takes 

f Wakefield \<> pardon, or 

1 put up with, tin me Sallies that relieve 

their stagnant e. " I found the prisoners 

merry," writes Dr. Primi my arrival; 

and each prepared with gillie gaol trick upon 

>r. Thus, a I 1 [divine- 

service], one turn- lent, and 



280 INCORRIGIBLE PRACTICAL JOKERS. 

then asked my pardon. A second, who stood at some 
distance, had a knack of spitting through his teeth, 
which fell in showers upon my book.''' A third would 
cry Amen in such a manner as to give the rest great 
delight. A fourth deftly picked the good man's pocket 
of his spectacles. But the one whose trick gave more 
entire gratification than all the rest, was he that dex- 
terously displaced the vicar's books on the table before 
him, and put a scandalous jest-book of his own in their 
place. One of Swift's Tatlers is about Goodman Cross, 
whose stable-boy "was a gibing companion, that 
would always have his jest. He would often put cow- 
itch in the beds, pull stools from under folks, and lay a 
coal upon their shoes when they were asleep. He was 
at last turned off for some notable piece of roguery ; 
and when I came away, was loitering among the ale- 
houses. Bless me ! thought I, what a prodigious wit 
would this have been with us !" The sense of mischief 
is, indeed, said to be a sense which goes quickly to sleep 
as soon as childhood is over, from mere want of oppor- 
tunity : the boy who wants to trip up his tutor can 
easily find a string to tie across the garden walk ; but 
when one has got beyond the simpler joys of childhood, 
strings are not so easy to find. "To carry out a 
practical joke of the Christopher Sly sort, we require, as 
Shakspeare saw, the resources of a prince." The history 
of Frederick the Great affords ample warrant for Mac- 
aulay's censure on that prince, for indulging in a taste 
which may be pardoned in a boy, but which when 
habitually and deliberately fostered by a man of mature 
age and strong understanding, is almost invariably the 
sign of a bad heart, a taste for severe practical jokes. 
Thus, if a courtier was fond of dress, oil was flung over 
his richest suit ; if he was fond of money, some prank was 
invented to make him disburse more than he could spare; 



PRACTICAL JOKES THAT ARE NO JOKES. 2S1 

if he was hypochondriacal, he was made to believe that 
he had the dropsy ; if he had particularly set his heart 
on visiting a place, a letter was forged to frighten him 
from going thither. To the plea that these things are 
trifles, Macaulay answers, that, granting them to be 

. they are indications, not to be mistaken, of a 
nature to which the sight of human suffering and human 
radation is an agreeable excitement. 
The point at which practical joking becomes a serious 
offence, is defined to be that where it passes from the 
r\- of boyish fun to that of intentional personal 
annoyance; and it is because practical joking among 
grown-up people seldom can be anything else but this 
latter, that it ought to be, and as a rule is, discounte- 
nanced among them. Satirical describcrs of the ways 
of country houses refer to the pleasing relief sometimes 
found in practical joking, when mind and body are 
wearied out by the cares of shooting and hunting : to 
put a man into his bath in the middle of the night must 
be an unfailing source of amusement, enhanced as it 
ma)' I sense of persona] danger; while to cut up 

his hair-brushes, cut off his coat-tails, put animals, dead 
or alive, into his bed, to hammer his head against the 
wall, having previously wrapped him in a blanket, are 

tended as ingenuities highly in vogue with men of 
In proportion to the age and position of the 

t will be the entertainment derived." Hartley 
1 was in this anaesthetic enough to de- 

al jokes as in bad t.i * But 1 

all he abhorred those which play upon the fears of the 
timid, or, like forged Love-letters, work on the affections 
of th' ptible ; while he d a perhaps to.. 

UCfa tin ' ftly infringe: on the 

the aval fticial or sclf- 

Unportan and infirmity, r, he would at 
any rate hold sacred. 



282 MAKING A FOE FOR THE SAKE OF A JEST. 

As there are reckless practical jokers, who must have 
their joke ; so are there reckless verbal jesters, who must 
have their jest. 

La Bruyere reckons among the characteristics of a 
right royal nature, " un grand eloignement pour la 
raillerie piquante, ou assez de raison pour ne se le 
permettre point." Elsewhere he had said, what nobody 
before him (he believed) had said, and what he dared to 
say, that those who do hurt to the reputation or the 
well-being of others, rather than lose the chance of say- 
ing a smart thing, deserve some thoroughly ignominious 
punishment : meritent une peine infamante. Gay warns 
all and sundry such misdoers that 

" In wit and war the bully race 
Contribute to their own disgrace : 
Too late the forward youth shall find 
That jokes are sometimes paid in kind ; 
Or if they canker in the breast, 
He makes a foe who makes a jest." 

This is directed to the address of the lad of all-sufficient 
merit, who " with modesty ne'er damps his spirit," but 
noisy jokes at random throws, bespattering both friends 
and foes. The temptation of saying a smart and witty 
thing, or bon mot, and the malicious applause with 
which it is commonly received, has made people who can 
say them, and still oftener (remarks Lord Chesterfield) 
people who think they can, but cannot, and yet try, — 
more enemies, and implacable ones too, than any other 
thing the politest of peers could think of. " It is a 
decided folly to lose a friend for a jest ; but in my mind, 
it is not a much less degree of folly, to make an enemy 
of an indifferent and neutral person, for the sake of a 
bon mot" Swift's metrical epistle to Mr. Delany includes 
the caution, — 

" If what you said I wish unspoke, 
'Twill not suffice it was a joke ; 



PRIOR'S PONTIUS AXD PONTIA, 2S3 

Reproach not, though in jest, a friend, 
For those defects he cannot mend. 
• ••••* 

'' When jests are carried on too far, 
And the loud laugh begins the war, 
You keep yuur countenance for shame, 
Yet still you think your friend to blame ; 
For though men cry they love a jest, 
Tis but when others stand the test ; 
And (would you have their meaning known) 
They love a jest that is their own." 

n's Panegyric on the Dean thus compli- 
ments him <m the character of his jesting : 

" Now as a jester I accost you ; 
Which never yet one friend has lost you. 
You judge so nicely to a hair, 
How far to go, and when to spare; . . . 
There's none so ignorant and weak 
To take offence at what you speak." 

Cicero's excellence at hitting off a jest or repartee 
animated his pleadings, but his reluctance ever to lose 
one, at whosesoever cost, was a frequent and final cause 

, and, says Plutarch, "L, r <>t him the character of 
a malevolent man." His employing indiscriminately his 
gift of cutting raillery, merely to raise a laugh, plutot 
que de perdre un bon mot, "rendered him extremely 

." He "never spared his jests upon his 
allies." Like Prii 

tins, who 1 know, ;i joke, 

Much better than he loves his life ; " — 

and therefore, and to that extent, ////like 

otia, that civil prudent she, 
Who rail* 1 vrit mu< fa V 
I never darts a repai 

But purely in her own deieil( 

improper than unsafe, one of our seventeenth- 
centu deems it, to "fling about at random 



284 THE MAN WHO WILL HA VE HIS JEST. 

this wormwood of the brain, our wit ; for some noses are 
too tender to endure the smell of it." And though there 
may be many, he adds, who, like tiled houses, can admit 
a falling spark without injury ; yet some, again, are 
covered with such light, dry straw, that with the least 
touch they will kindle, and flame about your ears. 
" Laughter should dimple the cheek, not furrow the 
brow." " It is but an unhappy wit, which stirs up enemies 
against the owner of it. A man may spit out his friend 
from his tongue, or laugh him into an enemy." Gall 
and mirth seem to Feltham an ill and unnatural mixture. 
It is the pronounced quality of good taste, in the flush 
of excitement and the exuberance of invention never to 
say a thing better not said — to exercise always a nice 
and true discrimination, to suppress the unseasonable 
witticism, to quench the sudden flash, to be witty and 
wise, keeping wit well in hand. A French critic says of 
the old trouvere Rutebeuf, who satirized and slashed 
away at the prelates, whom he yet knew to be under 
royal protection, " N'importe. II aime mieux perdre la 
protection du roi qu'une malice." George Herbert 
calls 

" Wit an unruly engine, wildly striking 
Sometimes a friend, sometimes the engineer. 
Hast thou the knack ? pamper it not with liking : 
But if thou want it, buy it not too dear. 
Many affecting wit beyond their power, 
Have got to be a dear fool for an hour." 

A fastidious taste is critical of its own conceits ; but bad 
taste, as a discourser upon it observes, is apt to throw 
itself headlong, and blindfold, after the first scent of a 
joke. The jocose element is the true arena of bad taste; 
for what is grave bad taste to facetious bad taste? 
" How terrible some people are in their jokes ! And it 
need not be a bad joke either, to be in bad taste." It is 



ILL RENOWN FOR REPARTEE. 2S5 

not because the jester is devoid of humour, but because, 
in his pursuit of it, every consideration of time and place 
is disregarded ; till in fact an offensive inappropriateness 
becomes the very crown of the jest. 

'• I'll not lose my jeer, 

Though I be beaten dead for ':," 

Marrall. Pha^drus flouts the fools who 
often, while trying to raise a silly giggle, provoke others 
by gross affronts, and so put themselves in real jeopardy. 
" Plerumque stulti risum dum captant levem, Gravi dis- 

int alios contumelia, Et sibi nocivum concitant 
periculum." Shenstone's comment on the saying that 
wits will lose their best friend for the sake of a joke, is, 
that candour may discover the cause to be, not the less 

2 of their benevolence, but the greater degree of 
their love of fame. On the other hand, Addison treats 
the matter as one mainly of good nature. The good- 
natured man, he says, may sometimes bring his wit in 
question, because he is apt to be movedwith compassion 
for those misfortunes and infirmities which another would 
turn into ridicule, and by that means obtain the reputa- 
wit. Whereas the ill-natured man gives him- 
er field to expatiate in, exposes the feelings in 
human nature which the other would cast a veil over, 
falls indifferently upon friends or enemies, exposes the 
iii- obliged him, and in short sticks at 

nothing that may establish his character as a wit. 

■ 

Will 

With In- 

./.r at you: 

And 

t balm foi 

is in effect a paraphrase of the 

rb, where the dinger of firebrands, aiTOWS, and 



286 STERNE'S YORICK, SHAKSPEARES BIRON. 

death, thinks to right himself with the query, Am I not 
in sport ? 

Sterne refers to the class of Yorick's " indiscretions ** 
his trick of saying whatever came uppermost — and he 
had but too many temptations in life of scattering his 
gibes and his jests about him, nor were they lost for 
want of gathering. The jester raised a laugh at the 
jestee's expense, and thought no more about it ; but the 
jests were not therefore crossed out of the jestee's book 
of remembrance. And Yorick, " to speak the truth, had 
wantonly involved himself in a multitude of small book 
debts of this stamp, which, notwithstanding Eugenius's 
advice, he too much disregarded ; " Eugenius persistently 
warning him that, one day or other, he would certainly 
be reckoned with, and to the uttermost mite. Biron, in 
Shakspeare, is marked out for censure, and for pe- 
nance as — 

" A man replete with mocks, 
Full of comparisons and wounding flouts ; 
Which he on all estates will execute, 
That lie within the mercy of his wit." 

The only soil of his fair virtue's gloss, another 
speaker says of him, is a sharp wit matched with too 
blunt a will ; " whose edge hath power to cut, whose 
will still wills it none should spare that come within 
his power." Richelieu's strange mocking humour is 
believed to have made him more enemies than his 
political sins ; and we are told that his courtiers were 
always at work to hunt up some ridiculous character on 
whom the Cardinal might vent his bitter plaisanteries. 
Burnet describes Savile, Lord Halifax, as "a man of 
great and ready wit, . . . much turned to satire . . . 
His severe jest was preferred by him to all arguments 
whatever ; and he was endless in council, if he could 
find a new jest," etc. It was Dr. South's custom, a 



TOO FOND OF A JEST TO SPARE A FRIEXD. 2S7 

clerical contemporary testifies, " to suffer neither sacred- 
ness of place nor solemnity of subject to restrain his 
vein of humour," — and the remark is made in reference to 
an " illiberal and cruel M witticism of his, at the expense 
thony a Wood, whose friendship it cost him. A bit 
of dialogue between Geronte and Florise, in Le Mediant 
of Gr characteristically pertinent : " Croyez-vous 

qu'il soit sourd, et qu'il n'ait rien senti ? " exclaims the 
former, by way of remonstrance, and in behalf of a butt : 

" Yous autres, fortes tetes, 

Yous voila! vous prenez tous les gens pour des betes ; 
ae me'nageant ricii . . . 

Eh mais ! tant pis pour lui, 
S'il s'en est offense' ; e'est aussi trop d"ennui, 
S'il faut a chaque mot voir comme on peut le prendre. 

s ce qui me vient et Ton peut me le rendre : 
Le ridicule est fait pour notre amusement, 
1 plaisanterie est libre." 

The story of the life of a celebrated German satirist of 

the last century, Christian Ludwig Liscov, is that of one 

passed his days in tranquillity, had not 

his love of ridicule prevailed over his prudence," and 

involved him in a series of pains and penalties, a state- 

ints) included. I [orace's is a well- 

of warning against the unscrupulous jest- 

ite a laugh, spares no 

friend, — "he has hay upon his horn, give him a wide 
." in allusion to the old practice of tying a wi 
• he horns of a vi< ious bull : — 
Bum babel in cornu, Ion 1 mm 

. uti.it sihi, non hie CUiquam ]> >." 

Boswell 01 1 it with a view to Boothe the 

f David G trrick when Johnson had been 

deriding him; and at the woi tm habet in eornu t 

a whole mow 
of it." Of Gi n the younger a biographer 



288 SELF-RESTRAINT IN SALLIES OF WIT. 

records, that for the reputation of a wit he laboured 
with unwearied assiduity, and alike sacrificed a friend 
or provoked an enemy, by his efforts to obtain it, 
Denbigh, in one of Mr. Lister's books, is drawn from 
the life — a dexterous diner-out and self-seeker, who 
" would sacrifice any one for the sake of a witticism. 
You complain that he jested at your misfortunes — did 
you never hear him jest at the misfortunes of others ? " 
Leslie tells us of Constable, that no man more earnestly 
desired to stand well with the world ; but he could not 
conceal his opinions of himself and of others, and what 
he said had too much point not to be repeated, and too 
much truth not to give offence. Of Sydney Smith, and 
his personal witticisms, the very exaggerations of which 
took away their sting, Leslie elsewhere expresses a 
belief that no man was ever so amusing with so little 
offence ; for those who were the subjects of his jokes 
were often the most ready to relate them. Although 
claiming for Professor Aytoun some talent for sharpness 
of repartee, Mr. Theodore Martin describes him as of 
too kindly and sympathetic a nature to shine as a wit ; 
for not only was his friend dearer to him than his jest, 
but he had that fine instinct of pain which suspends 
many a flash of humour or wit that might dazzle numbers 
but must wound one. This is better in every way than 
such a character as Perthes gives of the elder Schlegel, 
in the way of defence too : " Good-natured he certainly 
is, if not tempted by a sally of wit." Cockburn ascribes 
to Jeffrey an habitual gaiety that never was allowed 
rein enough to outrun kind feeling. To apply what 
Henry Mackenzie says of one of his characters, his 
vivacity only rose to be amiable ; no enemy could ever 
repeat his wit, so as to lose him a friend. The pro- 
fessional diner-out is said by those who have studied 
him out to make a point of displaying a certain good- 



WHICH TO SACRIFICE, FRIEXD OR JEST ? 2S9 

natured dulness, an amiability that shall repress the 
brightest jest that ever was conceived, if by any possi- 
bility the unuttcrcd jest could be thought to tell against 
one of the party ; for " the diner-out must never be 
known to utter a brilliant witticism at the cost of any 
dinner-giver.'"' He may crack nuts, whilst dinner-givers 
and common men crack jokes of that damaging sort. 
Burns made the judicious grieve for his future when 
y noticed how completely his wit ever had the start 
<>f his judgment, and would lead him to indulge in 
lillery uniformly acute/' so Dr. Currie styles it, how- 
ever (rcc it might be from the least desire to wound. 
The suppression of a telling bon mot, from a dread ot 
paining the object of it, has been classed with the 
virtues " only to be sought for in the calendar of 
and Burns was no saint. Fielding makes it 
of the peculiarities of his Partridge, that the vice of 
ting at all hazards was in him incurable ; and though 
little Benjamin often smarted for it, yet, if ever he con- 
l joke, he was certain to be delivered of it, with- 
out the least respect <>f persons, time, or place. So of 

quire, we read, that it had ever 

:i his misfortune, that he could not for the soul of 

him 1 a good thing — which fatality drew upon 

him the ill-will of many whom he would not have 

•vld. The Hon. Miss Byron points 

her immaculate Sir Charles as an example of superi- 

this mischievous indulgence, when she upbraid- 

rfect and more outspoken sister, 

many who could I art 

were they to indulge a win of 
wh ill humour? !)<> you think your brother is 

k be too 1 

>\v- 
n." Mary Stuart, wilful and wanton in wit, 



290 WHICH TO SACRIFICE, FRIEND OR JEST? 

provokes even her devoted Catherine Seyton to exclaim 
to herself, *' Now, Our Lady forgive me ! How deep 
must the love of sarcasm be implanted in us women, 
since the Queen, with all her sense, will risk ruin rather 
than rein in her wit." When Ethel Newcome bids her 
brother Barnes be kind, for that is better than all the 
wit in the world, she points to desolate old Lady Kew 
as a warning example : " Look at grandmamma, how 
witty she was and is ; what a reputation she had, how 
people were afraid of her ; and see her now — quite 
alone." Very different is the smug complacency of the 
Rev. Charles Honeyman's warning : " Satire ! satire ! 
Mr. Pendennis," said that divine, holding up a reproving 
finger of lavender kid, " beware of a wicked wit ! — But 
when a man has that tendency, I know how difficult it 
is to restrain." Boileau's 

" jeune fou qui se croit tout permis, 

Et qui pour un bon mot va perdre vingt amis," 

may pair off with Sir Perfidious Oldcraft's exemplar, in 
Beaumont and Fletcher, 

" a Duke Humphrey spark, 

Had rather lose his dinner than his jest. 

I say I love a wit the best of all things." 

To which category may be consigned the whole race of 
what Jonson's Knowell characterizes and condemns as 

" petulant jeering gamesters, that can spare 

No argument or subject from their jest." 

Of which, in another play, rare Ben offers us a salient 
example in the person of Carlo Buffone, who will sooner 
lose his soul than a jest, and profane even the most holy 
things, to excite laughter. 



XXVIII. 

SEL&BESTO WED PRAISE. 

Pi; ncvii. 2.* 

EVERY man his own trumpeter, is, ironically or 
otherwise, an accepted adage ; but it is not 
among the Proverbs of Solomon. His counsel on the 
subject takes another direction altogether : " Let an- 
other man praise thee, and not thine own mouth ; a 
inger, and not thine own lips." James Howel, the 
.it old letter-writer, quoting the Latin proverb, pro- 
i laus sordet in ore, thus pungently paraphrases it : 
•' Be a man's breath ever so sweet, yet it makes one's 
praise stink, if lie makes his own mouth the conduit- 
pipe of it." But some people think they can do their 
own praise best Who else is so competent to appre- 
ciate and appraise them ? The Milverton of Friends hi 
mewhere observes that praise is always a dull 
thing; that people seldom spend much time in praising; 
and th.it when a man looks back upon his misspent 
hours, he will not find that he has to reproach himself 
: them having been spent in commendation. 
I.t K fou auld once avowed, ironically or not, his 

ntance of the law he had prescribed to himself of 

er uttering his own praises : what a man)- more Pol- 
and partisans he might have had, but for that 
ordinance! Look, for instance, said he, 
laure and M. de Miossens, who discourse 
iuple of hours together b ms, 

themselves the w h< >le time ; 1 >nly 

<>f illustrations «»t this I 
t Series i 

jO. 



292 SINGING ONE'S OWN PRAISES. 

two or three out of the twenty who find them insuffer- 
able, and the remaining seventeen applaud and regard 
them as peerless — comme des gens qui riont point leurs 
semblables. Sainte-Beuve suggests that if Roquelaure 
and Miossens had judiciously intermingled with their 
self-commendations a little praise of their listeners, they 
would have been better listened to still. That is to say, 
one may infer, that all the twenty would have been good 
listeners ; as to the seventeen, they surely were as good 
as could be already. 

Ehleypoolie, the Cingalese grandee, in Joanna Baillie's 
Indian drama, candidly demands, — 

" If I commend myself, who, like myself, 
Can know so well my actual claims to praise ?" 

to which demand an acquiescent companion maliciously 
responds, "Most true ; for surely no one else doth know 
it." When the red Indian of another hemisphere calls 
upon the moribund old trapper in Cooper's Prairie to 
tell his auditory how many ]\Iingoes he has struck, and 
what acts of valour and justice he has done, that they 
may know how to admire, and so come to imitate him, 
he replies, with simple earnestness of manner and speech, 
"A boastful tongue is not heard in the heaven of a 
white man. . . . Xo, my son, a pale-face may not 
sing his own praises, and hope to have them acceptable 
before his God." So thinks not the vaunting Phara- 
mond, Prince of Spain, in Beaumont and Fletcher's 
Philaster, whose opening speech is " nothing but a large 
inventory of his own commendations," moving Dion to 
the speculation, — 

" I wonder what's his price ? For certainly 
He'll sell himself, he has so praised his shape." 

Arbaces in the King and No King of the same joint- 
stock authorship, is a yet more accomplished master in 



BL XE'S OWN TRUMi 

the art of brag, while invoking heaven and earth to say 
if he have need to brag. His self-asserting speeches run 
over with such recurring phrases as, " Should I then 
boast ? " " Far then from me be ostentation.'' " I could 
tell the :his, that, and the other, 

:" I would brag. Should I, that have the pov 
To teach the neighbour world hun 
Mix with vainglory ? Did I but take delight 

retch my deeds as others do, on words, 
I could amaze my hearers. . . . 
But he shall wrong his and my mode- 
That thinks me apt to boast- After an act 

3r a god to do upon his foe, 

:le glory in a soldier's mouth 
Is well becoming; be it far from \ 

Don Quixote, perceiving that he had attracted the 
attention of the traveller in green, and being the pin' : 
courtesy and always desirous of pleasing, anticipated 
questions by an announcement of name, style, and 
achievements ; ending his speech with the apologetic 
assurance, "Though self-praise depreciates, I am com- 
pelled s to pronounce my own commendations, 
but it is only when no friend is present to perform that 
office for m 

The once widely popular as highly patronized 

author -, vindicates the right, nay duty, of 

blowing or. irumpet .'<s in a 

: — 

tman triumph was decreed, 
bimsetf mu>t pi 

hen, the where, and how 
for his br 

.e trump ■ 

kt's kindliY nial and 

•hem all. 
>ntinued self-eu'. 



294 BLOWING ONE'S OWN TRUMPET. 

lines, which, however, we read to the end without any 
feeling of distaste, almost without a consciousness that 
we have been listening all the while to a man praising 
himself — there being in it none of the " cold particles, 
the hardness and self-ends, which render vanity and 
egotism hateful" He seems, says Elia, to be praising 
another person, under the mask of self; or rather, we 
feel that it was indifferent to him where he found the 
virtue which he celebrates ; whether another's bosom or 
his own were its chosen receptacle. This is self-praise 
with a difference ; the Non-Ego commingled and con- 
founded with the Ego, after approved Teutonic fashion. 

Self-depreciation was not the foible of the Earl of 
Leicester, Elizabeth's Earl ; witness the " most ingenu- 
ous reference to himself," as Mr. Motley calls it, in the 
Leicester correspondence in 1586, relating to Zutphen : 
" In my former letters I forgot one, who not only on that 
day but at every day's service, hath been a principal 
actor himself. A tall, wise, rare servant he is, as I know, 
and of marvellous good government and judgment. 
That gentleman may take a great charge upon him, I 
warrant you." John Foster's apology would never seem 
to come amiss to such as need it, if put upon their 
defence : he writes to the Rev. Joseph Hughes, " If you 
are beginning to say, ' Let another praise thee, and not 
thyself,' I may ask whether it should not be an excepted 
case where that ' other ' has not sense to see anything in 
me to praise." An excepted case : every man is willing 
enough to make his own case an exception, and to let 
the exception prove the rule. 

The rule is a proved and approved one, by all the 
world. The exception, by the individual claimant in 
particular. His personal and perhaps peremptory claim 
abates not in the least his adhesion to the proverb of 
King Solomon and to the counsel of Sir Matthew Hale 



RESOLUTE SELF-ASSERTIOX. 295 

to his children, which runs : " Be careful that you do not 
commend yourselves. It is a sign that your reputation 
is small and sinking if your own tongue must praise 
you ; and it is fulsome and unpleasing to others to hear 
such commendations." But, for all that, the worldly- 
wise insist, with a good show of reason, upon the value 
of a little timely and resolute self-assertion. We accept 
every person in the world as that for which he gives 
himself out, says Goethe, only he must give himself out 
for something ; we can put up with the unpleasant more 
easily than we can tolerate the insignificant. When Sir 
Charles Dazzle, in Reynolds* comedy, bids Pav£ speak 
highly of his patron, "Ay, and of myself too, Sir 
Charles," says the other ; " for, in this unthinking age, 
say you're a clever fellow, and everybody believes it — 
they remember they heard you praised, and forget 
where." A lady-novelist assures us that many mode- 
rately good-looking women reign as beauties by reason 
of the firm faith they manifest in their own superiority 
<>f personal appearance: faith is contagious; and what 
the possessor so evidently believes in, the world feels 
must exist. Monsieur Rigaud IS said to have had a cer- 
tain air of being a handsome man— which he was not; 
and a certain air of being a well-bred man — which he 
was not : it was mere swagger and challenge ; but in this 
particular, as in many others, blustering assertion goes 
for proof, half tin: world over. " Even beauty," remarks 
ayist on tacit dictation, "is rarely fully recognized 

if its ; or is either unable or unwilling to act the 

As in the case of the precious metals nature 
Supplies the material, but before it can be- used as cur- 
rent coin each man must stamp it with his own impress 
in a mint of his own, and those who arc richest in bul- 
lion are by no means always best provided with the 
machinery required f<>r coining it, for making current 



296 BLOWING ONE'S OWN TRUMPET. 

coin of it. Thus qualities which their owner does not 
in a manner announce, will generally not be recognized 
at all. " Those who are best entitled to deference or 
admiration often prefer to preserve their incognito in 
general society, but that the power of making them is 
a valuable one is not the less true." Aristotle's con- 
summate character does not think too highly of himself ; 
but it is equally his duty not to think of himself too 
meanly : " he will not assert himself too much, but he 
will be just as careful not to assert himself too little." 
The golden mean, according to the great Greek political 
philosopher, consists in thoroughly knowing what one is 
really worth, and in " bearing oneself accordingly." In 
his tractate on Right of Precedence, Swift would on no 
account have the young men he is counselling underrate 
themselves, for that is the ready way, he reckons, to be 
despised by others ; and the consequences of contempt 
are fatal. For his part, the sarcastic Dean takes self- 
conceit and self-assertion to be of all others the most 
useful and profitable of characteristics : witness the 
bishops, and judges, and smart writers, and pretty fel- 
lows, and pleasant companions, and good preachers, 
that, to his knowledge, have been made thereby. In 
his Tale of a Tub he professes to have been often told 
in confidence by Dryden, that the world would never 
have suspected him to be so great a poet, if he had not 
assured them of it so frequently in his prefaces that by 
no possibility could they either doubt or forget it. 
What Pope Englishes from Homer — 

" A just proportion of refulgent brass," 
is of main importance on the forehead, as well as for the 
mouthpiece, of him who blows his own trumpet. Men 
of no more than ordinary discernment never, according 
to Adam Smith, rate any man higher than he appears 
to rate himself: he seems doubtful, they say, whether 



SELF-COXSCIOUS AXD SELF-ASSERTIXG. 297 

he is perfectly fit for such a situation or such an office, 
and immediately they give the preference to some impu- 
dent blockhead, who entertains no doubt about his own 
qualifications, and who sounds his own praises in the 
most resonant of sounding brass. 

"'T would take a Byron and a Scott, I tell ye, 
Rolled up in one, to make a Pat Q*Kclly !" 

Doubtless such was the honest conviction of the Irish 
rhapsodist ; and if so, Father Prout pleads for him, he 
had an undeniable right to put his opinion on record, 
and publish it to the world. Chateaubriand cites ap- 
plaudingly the custom of the Spartans to vaunt in public 
their individual prowess — as thinking that the man who 
praises himself in the face of the world, enters into an 
engagement to deserve the praise ; and thus would the 
distinguished Voyagair 01 A mcr ique explain and justify 
the excess of self-assertion on the part of the redskin 
chiefs. Of America herself it was some years ago re- 
marked by an eminent writer, that having had her way 
to make in the world, self-assertion had been in her case 
a national necessity ; she could not afford to be troubled 
with any inconvenient modesty ; it might be all very- 
well fur old countries, with established reputations,* to 
be unobtrusive and reserved ; but young people, she 

* Writing about the Danes in 1863, a Saturday Reviewer 
ascribed to them, as to the Greeks, the peculiar patriotism of a 
■mall nation— of a nation which hold-, itself to have been Bomewhat 
d and ill-treated. A patriotism of this kind, heo 

OSCiouS and sell ; it is always thinking of itself, and 

thinking what other people will think of it. The same son 

nen and Irishmen! as opposed to English- 
: ..hat different form, in Americans also. "The 

I a small people in the sense in which 
Denmark is small, but th ile, who still 

in some sort, to make their way in the world," etc, 

. xv. 43J. 



298 ADVANTAGES OF SELF-ASSERTION. 

knew, must sound their trumpet pretty loud if they mean 
to get on. So America made no secret of her merits : 
" Si quid honesti est Jactat et ostendit;" and so long 
had she been accustomed, said her critic, to showing 
cause why she should be reckoned a great nation, that 
" she goes on showing cause long after she had gained a 
verdict/' One of the apophthegms of Owen Meredith 
in The Artist, is — 

" Assert thyself ; and by and by 
The world will come and lean on thee." 
There is no harm in being respected in this world, Samuel 
Titmarsh professes to have found out ; and if you don't 
brag a little for yourself, " depend on it there is no per- 
son of your acquaintance who will tell the world of your 
merits, and take the trouble off your hands." Another 
shrewd authority shrewdly suspects that the majority of 
Englishmen measure a man by his own standard : they 
take you at your own word, and do not think highly of 
you unless you seem to think highly of yourself. " In- 
solent swagger and self-conceit will not of course go 
down, but a certain flavour of sober self-esteem has a 
wonderful effect upon the general public. If you are 
deferential, it is probable that a stranger will condemn 
you as a humbug. If you are retiring and modest, 
many will consider you effeminate and sneaking." 
Pretence is ever bad, remarks the author of The 
Original ; but there are many who obscure their good 
qualities by a certain carelessness, or even an affected 
indifference ; and the man who conceals or disguises his. 
merit, and yet expects to have credit for it, " might as 
well expect to be thought clean in his person, if he chose 
to go covered with filthy rags/' The world, we are em- 
phatically warned, will not, and in great measure cannot, 
but judge by appearances, and worth must stamp itself, 
if it hopes to pass current even against baser metal. 



PROFICIENTS IN SELF- ASSERTION. 299 

• S elf-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin 
lf-neglec: 

the French king is admonished by the more spirited 
dauphin in Shakspeare's King Henry J'. The French 
Shakspeare, if Corneille be he, cannot be taxed with 
neglect of the admonition. Like his heroes, this dramatic 
Peter the Great, cc grand Pierre, talked in as tall talk of 
himself as he thought, and accepted as his simple due 
the profoundest and profusest homage that was paid him 
in his prime : 

sais ce que je vaux. et crois ce quon nYen dit.*' 
Paracelsus began his professional career by burning 
publicly, in his class-room, the works of Galen and 
Avicenna, assuring his hearers that the strings of his 
shoes possessed more knowledge than those two medical 
Oracles. All the universities united had not, he 
assured his pupils, as much knowledge as was contained 
in his own beard, and the hairs upon his head were 
better informed than all the writers that ever existed 
put together. French historians admire the reply of 
Duguesclin to his captor the Black Prince when con- 
temptuously, or -lighting to show indiffer- 
ence, asked to fix his own ransom : ' N than a 
hundred thousand francs," amazed the prince into 

•• Where will lertrand ? " And 

trand replied that the King of Castile would ; 
half, the K Fiance the other; and if that were 

not enough, not a Frenchwoman able to spin but would 

ifT for hi m. " He did not presume 

ilue, ,J Michel 

■ We all do stamp our value on 
The ; hallcnge for our 

quoth Butler in Wallenstein ik roundly 

want of courage A firm and lofty judgment, sound and 



300 SELF-ASSURANCE AND SELF-ASSERTION. 

sure in its judging, makes use of one's own example, says 
he, upon all occasions, as readily as those of others, and 
gives evidence as freely of oneself as of a third person. 
Montaigne accounts it to be, indeed, equally a fault not 
to discern how far a man's worth extends, and to claim 
more than a man discovers in himself. Considering Ben- 
venuto Cellini's exuberance of self-assertion, who would 
have looked for a rebuke from his lips, of all men, on 
Sansovino, for boasting at his own table of his own 
achievements in Art? "I was so disgusted at this be- 
haviour," protests Cellini, " that I did not eat one 
morsel with appetite. I only took the liberty to express 
my sentiments thus : ' Signor Giacopo, . . . men of 
genius who distinguish themselves by their works, are 
much better known by the commendations of others, 
than by vainly sounding their own praises." Cellini's 
own trumpet for self-praise was of triple trombone size 
and power and tone. It is as different as well can be 
from what Professor Masson terms that "vein of noble 
egotism, of unbashful self-assertion," which runs through- 
out the opera {iiecnon opusculd) omnia of Milton — a par- 
ticular form of self-esteem in keeping with his moral 
austerity of character. The dread felt by Robert Burns 
of anything approaching to meanness or servility is said 
to have rendered his manner somewhat hard and decided, 
when associating with the " gentry." There appeared, 
as Dr. Currie describes it, in his first manner and address 
perfect ease and self-possession, but a stern and almost 
supercilious elevation, not indeed incompatible with 
openness and affability, which however bespoke a mind 
conscious of superior talents. " Only be sure that you 
really can stand up stoutly for yourself," urges the coun- 
sellor of Friends in Council, when cautioning a simple- 
minded relative that friends are not all-potent for good, 
and that a man's friend may be ill, or travelling, or 



SELF-DISPARAGEMEXT IMPOLITIC. 501 

shelved, " but good self-assurance is always within call." 
What a man has to do in society, is to assert himself, 
Mr. Thackeray affirms ; and he felicitates the purchaser 
of that volume of his which enunciates the maxim, on 
having made a bargain, and put out his money well, if 
he will but lay the maxim to heart, and follow it through 
life. M. Cuvillier Fleury owns to having once been of 
the same mind with Eugene Delacroix, whom he heard 
say, once upon a time, that a man should never talk- 
about himself, whether good or bad — the good is not 
believed, and the bad is. But the critic changed his 
view, after certain experiences in literature and life, and 
he then formally avowed his conviction of the utility 
of talking about oneself. Self-praise he found to have 
the same fortune sometimes as running down another 
man. Calumniate ! for some of the calumny is sure 
to stick. Brag of yourself, boldly, vigorously, persist- 
ently, — and the world will, in the end, ban grc, vial grc, 
come round to your opinion. 

There is a popular essay concerning the world's opinion, 
the clerical author of which remonstrates with the puny 
pitiful people who appear to be always apologizing for 
venturing to be in this world at all ; and as this is a 
painful and degrading point to arrive at. so is it also, he 
rids, a morally wrong one, — implying, as it <': 

■ >( " Who put you in this world, that you 
should wish to .skulk through it in that fashion.'' The 

Creator put you here, he argues, in alowly place indeed, 

1 a right in it, in your own place 

in it, as to Queen or Emperor. To systematically and 

rlatively disp teself, by no means implies a 

tentious and genuine observance of the pi 

If-praise. Rather it indicates in many ca 

craving for contradiction, the flatter the better. I. a 

ere calls lafausse modestie le dernier raffinement de 



302 ART OF SELF- VALUA TION. 

la vanite. To apply a subtle comment of Shakspeare's 
Angelo, — 

" Thus wisdom wishes to appear most bright, 
When it doth tax itself : as these black masks 
Proclaim an enshield beauty ten times louder 
Than beauty could, displayed." 

They who do speak ill of themselves, do so mostly, says 
Julius Hare, as the surest way of proving how modest and 
candid they are. A North British divine cites applaud- 
ingly the case of the weaver in a Scottish village, who 
prayed daily and fervently for a better opinion of him- 
self ; so great a help in life is a firm conviction of one's 
own importance. Emerson professes to have known a 
man who, in a certain religious exaltation, " thought it 
an honour to wash his own face," — and who seemed to 
the Essayist more sane than those who hold themselves 
cheap. Goethe's Arkas, in the Iphigenia, can forgive, 
though he must needs deplore, the pride that underrates 
itself ; yet anon he demands of the priestess, — 

" Him dost thou praise who underrates his deeds ? 
Ifih. Who highly rates his deeds is justly blamed. 
Ark. We blame alike who proudly disregard 

Their genuine merit, and who vainly prize 
Their spurious worth too highly." 

Neque culpa neqite lauda teipsum is a wholesome 
maxim, in deprecation of the morbid egotism which 
prompts a man to make himself out either better or 
worse than he is. Speaking of some characters he had 
met with who greatly distrusted their capacity, and were 
inclined to think they did nothing well, and who were 
perfectly justified in that opinion, M. de Tocqueville re- 
marks, " The truth is, that great self-confidence and great 
self-distrust proceed from the same source, an extreme 
desire to shine, which prevents men from judging them- 
selves calmly and temperately." Swift is caustic on the 
general fault in conversation of those who habitually talk 



ABSURDL V APOLOGETIC. 303 

of themselves — and the particular one of making a 
vanity of telling their own faults : they cannot dissem- 
ble, forsooth ; there is something in their nature that 
abhors insincerity ; with many other insufferable topics 
of the same altitude. 4< Of such might)' importance 
even- man is to himself, and ready to think he is to 
others." Apology is only egotism wrong side out, quoth 

Ltnerican Professor at the Breakfast-table, who holds 
that nine times out of ten, the first thing a man's com- 
panion knows of his shortcomings is from his deprecating 
flourish about them. " It is mighty presumptuous on 
your part to suppose your small failures of so much con- 
sequence that you must make a talk about them.'" An 

ist on False Shame has no hope for the man who 
after twenty, or at latest twenty-five, will harp in all com- 
panies on his red hair, or be perpetually reminding 
people that he is little, or embarrass them by allusions 
to his plebeian origin, or be making absurd apologies for 
his relations, or depreciate the dinner he has set before 
ICStS, — for he fails in the quality which defies and 
puts to flight false shame; and that is manliness: the 

. flusters, and perturbations of mauvaise honte are 

ted to be a .sign of some inherent discrepancy be- 
tween his intellect (however acute) and his moral nature, 
which will always keep him immature. Self-valuation, 
Shaftesbury in the Characteristics, .supposes 
self-worth ; and in a person conscious of real worth, is 
either no pride, or a just and noble one. In the same- 
manner, self-contempt "supposes a self-meanness or de- 
fectiveness ; and may be either a just modesty Or unjust 
humility." Butler reckons it 

" a harder thing for nun to rate 

.r own parts at an equal estimate, 
Than cast up fractions in the account of heaven, 

me and motion, and adjust tln.ni even ; 



301 TRICKS OF SELF-DISPARAGEMENT . 

For modest persons never had a true 
Particular of all that is their due." 

Dryden, again, is concerned with the fairer side of self- 
disparagement in his panegyric of the Countess of 
Abingdon — 

" She was not humble, but Humility. 
Scarcely she knew that she was great, or fair, 
Or wise, beyond what other women are . . . 
But still she found, or rather thought she found, 
Her own worth wanting, others' to abound ; 
Ascribed above their due to every one, 
Unjust and scanty to herself alone." 

But Dryden could shrewdly enough discern the 
other side of the impugned quality ; and he winds up 
his Essay 011 Satire with the self-applied reflection, 
touching himself as author and satirist, — 

" How vain a thing is man, and how unwise ! 
E'en he, who would himself the most despise. 
I, who so wise and humble seem to be, 
Now my own pride and vanity can't see." 

One of the tricks of his craft is exposed or expounded 
by the accomplished grandson and namesake of 
Glorious John's Achitophel, who descries such a peculiar 
grace and ingenuity in the approved method of avowing 
laziness, precipitancy, carelessness, or whatever other 
vices have been the occasion of an author's deficiency, 
that " it would seem a pity had the work itself been 
brought to such perfection as to have left no room for 
the penitent party to enlarge on his own demerits. For 
from the multiplicity of these, he finds subject to ingra- 
tiate himself with his reader; who doubtless is not a little 
raised by this submission of a confessing author."* 
There is, says Wordsworth, 

* Some authors, as the Earl of Chesterfield tells his son, have 
criticized their own works first, in hopes of hindering others from 
doing it afterwards, — and more efficiently. 



TAKEN AT ONES OWN VALLA T/OX. 305 

u a luxury in self-dispraise ; 

And inward self-disparagement affords 
To meditative spleen a grateful feast.'' 

But the inward sort is not very common. Its outward 
manifestations run through a whole gamut of notes. A 
sententious philosopher has affirmed that, as the man 
who displays his own merit is a coxcomb, so the man 
who dues not know it is a fool : — the man of sense knows 
it, exerts it, avails himself of it, but never boasts of it ; 
and always seems rather to under than over-value it ; 
though, in truth, he sets the right value upon it. La 
Bruyere's maxim is therefore to the purpose, " qu'on ne 
vaut dans ce monde, que ce que Ton veut valoir." To 
the man who underrates himself, says Adam Smith, we 
seldom fail to do, at least, all the injustice which he does 
to himself, and frequently a great deal more. " In almost 
all cases, it is better to be a little too proud than, in any 
respect, too humble ; and, in the sentiment of self-estima- 
some degree of excess seems, both to the person 
himself and tu the impartial spectator, to be less dis- 
agreeable than any degree of defect." To the person 
himself — because he is not only, on Doctor Adam's 
more unhappy in his own feelings than either 
the proud or the vain, but is much more liable to ill- 
pie. Johnson advised Boswell nut 
reciatingly of himself : the world will re- 
peat the evil report, and make no allowance forthe source. 
Henry Ci binson in his old age put a Nota 

1st this bil nee, in his Diary : " it would have 

been well for me had 1 distinctly recognized this truth 

before. It IS too late lor me now to change my practice." 

Dr. J.»lm 1 (Hie of his letters to Bui .ratu- 

his manifest disdain of the " nauseous 

ition of decrying your own merit as a poet," an 

affectation which is displayed with teotation, the 

X 



)o6 UNREASONABLE SELF-DISPARAGEMENT. 



author of Zeluco can testify, by those who have the 
greatest share of self-conceit, and which only adds un- 
deceiving falsehood to disgusting vanity. Burns him- 
self, a year later, in a letter to another correspondent, 
insists on the rights and duties of manly self-assertion, 
founded on self-knowledge, not self-conceit, — " the 
honest justice," he calls it, that a man of sense, who 
has thoroughly examined the subject, owes to himself. 
" Without this standard, this column in our own mind, 
we are perpetually at the mercy of the petulance, the 
mistakes, the prejudices, nay, the very weakness and 
wickedness of our fellow-creatures." Le prix que nous 
valons, qui le sait mieux que nous ? is Corneille's candid 
inquiry. Common-sense commentators on the text 
which says that the meek shall inherit the earth, point 
out the existence of two sorts of meekness; of which 
the desirable one does not mean an unreasonable dis- 
paragement of our own powers or merits in favour of 
those of other people, or a humble fetching and carry- 
ing in obedience to the views and feelings of indifferent 
persons. We find Byron assuring his " dear Moore," in 
1813, that he strangely underrates himself. "I should 
conceive it an affectation in any other; but I think I 
know you well enough to believe that you don't know 
your own value. However, 'tis a fault that generally 
mends, and, in your case, it really ought." Months later 
the noble lord renews the protest : " I see in you what I 
never saw in poet before, a strange diffidence of your 
own powers, which I cannot account for." De Quincey 
noted as specially characteristic of Charles Lamb an 
absolute abhorrence of all affectation, which showed itself 
in self-disparagement of every kind ; never the mock 
disparagement which is self-praise in an indirect form, as 
when people accuse themselves of all the virtues, by pro- 
fessing an inability to pay proper attention to prudence 



'DREADFULLY HUMBLE PEOPLE: 307 

or economy — or an uncontrollable disposition to be rash 
and inconsiderate on behalf of a weaker party when 
suffering apparent wrong. " Lamb's confessions of error, 
of infirmity, were never at any time acts of mock hu- 
mility, meant to involve oblique compliment in the 
rebound. " Ellesmere slashes away at the class of 
"dreadfully humble people" who make immense claims 
at the very time they are explaining that they have no 
claims ; and milder Milverton owns that they do make 
their humility somewhat obnoxious. Real humility, 
says Sir Henry Taylor, will not teach us any undue 
severity, but " truthfulness M in self-judgment. " My 
son, glorify thy soul in meekness, and give it honour 
according to the dignity thereof," is the counsel of the 
Son of Sirach ; for undue self-abasement and self-dis- 
trust will impair the strength and independence of the 
mind, which, if accustomed to have a just satisfaction 
with itself where it may, will the better bear to probe 
If, and will lay itself open with the more fortitude 
to intimations of its weakness on points in which it 
stands truly in need of correction. "No humility 
is thoroughly sound which is not thoroughly truth- 
ful/'' It is charged against the man who brings mis- 
directed or inflated accusations against himself, that he 
does so in a false humility, and will probably be found 
to indemnify himself on one side or another : — either he 
pride in his supposed humility or, escaping in 
his self-COndemnations from the darker into the lighter 
.fhis life and nature, he "plays at hide-and-seek 
with his conscience." A humble man, as Sir James 

him, is one who, thinking of bimself 

her more highly nor more lowly than he ought to 

think, passes a true judgment on ln's own character, And 

in reference t>> tin- great Benedictine, Mabillon, bearing 

himself among men of title and learning as if undeserving 



308 SELF-DEPRECIA TION. 

of their notice, and unworthy to communicate with them 
on equal terms, our ecclesiastical essayist affirms that 
genuine self-abasement there cannot be apart from a 
lofty conception of our own destiny, powers, and respon- 
sibilities ; and holds an abject carriage to be but a poor 
expression of one of the most excellent of human virtues, 
which, in its genuine state, will ever impart elevation 
to the soul and dignity to the demeanour. M. Necker 
thought it one of the most difficult of delicate questions 
to attain to a just estimate of one's self: " Les hommes 
qui ont une parfaite opinion d'eux-memes sont des 
heureux ridicules. Les hommes qui se querellent sans 
cesse sont des infortunes estimables. On observe diffi- 
cilement un juste milieu. II faudrait se regarder a dis- 
tance et se juger sans amour, sans aigreur, et comme une 
simple connaissance."* As we probably do mischief if 
we overrate our powers, so, if we under-estimate our- 
selves, we fail to do the good we might. A Christian 
who humbly feels that he is only an unprofitable servant 
before God, may at the same time be conscious of. his 
profitableness to his fellow-men. There is a recipe of 
Mr. Charles Reade's prescribing, which runs to this 
effect : — To know people's real estimate of themselves, 
study their language of self-depreciation. If, even when 
they undertake to lower themselves, they cannot help in- 
sinuating self-praise, be sure their humility is a puddle, 
their vanity is a well. Hartley Coleridge reckons it 
hard to praise another with a manly grace, still harder 
to praise one's self, — but to dispraise one's self in a be- 
coming manner,*)- the hardest of all. 

* M. Sainte-Beuve maliciously remarks, that even in judging 
himself after this manner and in the light of "a simple acquaint- 
ance," M. Necker was never out of humour with himself — n'ait 
jamais ete mecontent de lui. 

f Mr. Trollope explains his Clara Amedroz (in the Belton Estate) 



'LAUDARl A LAUDATO: 309 

Let another man praise thee. But how much de- 
pends on who and what that other man is ! The man 
whose praise one would covet, is the man who himself 
is a signal object of praise, and cordially respected 
as praiseworthy. Laudari a laudato, — that is praise 
worth the having. La Bruyere may well say that 
princes bepraised without end by grandees and courtiers 
:!d be very much more vain than they are, if they 
could but know the praisers to be themselves a little 
more praiseworthy. Shakspeare distinguishes Ca 
belan, in Cymbcline. as 

>mous in Caesars praises, no whit less 
Than in his feats deserving 

Addison's Juba declares of Cato, 

I*d rather have that man 

Approve my deeds, than worlds for my admire: 

To be commended by those who themselves deserve to 
be commended, and for things commendable in them- 
selves, Chesterfield pronounces the greatest pleasure 
anybody can feel. " When he whom everybody else 
flatters, flatters me, I then/' said Johnson, " am truly 
happy." The learned Germans who resorted to Rome 
that they might converse with Clavius, had a trick of 

ing that they would rather be attacked by him tl 
praised by any one else. What then must the praise 
of Clavius have been to them ! Po] er to those 

who would :amine him as to the why and 

re <>f his continued authorship, was, that well- 
nat irth inflamed him with e, that 

Cor ift endured his lays ; that even 

If ordinary writh th tl reci;ition 

of self which i 1 to all of 

tint they 
shall their own a 

opinion. 



3 io l LA UDARI A LA UDA TO. 



mitred Rochester would nod his head in approval, and 
accomplished St. John with open arms welcome one 
poet more : 

" Happy my studies, when by these approved ! 
Happier their author, when by these beloved ! 
From these the world will judge of men and books, 
Not from the Burnets, Oldmixons, and Cooks." 

The second line may remind us of the aspiration of 
M. J. Chenier, in his satire Sur la Calomnie : 

" Moi, qui, pour tout tresor, ne voudrais obtenir 
Que d'etre aime de ceux qu'aimera l'avenir." 

Gibbon avows in his Autobiography that, when pre- 
sent at the " august spectacle of Mr. Hastings in 
Westminster Hall," and a delighted listener to "Mr. 
Sheridan's eloquence," he could not hear without 
emotion the personal compliment which the orator paid 
him* in the presence of the British nation. The 
rational pride of an author, said Gibbon in another 
place, may be offended, rather than flattered, by vague 
indiscriminate praise ; but he cannot, nor should he, be 
indifferent to the fair testimonies of private and public 
esteem. Thackeray quotes the eulogy passed by Gibbon 
on Tom Jones, and his prediction of its enduring vitality, 
as the sentence not to be gainsaid of a great judge ; for, 
to have your name mentioned by Gibbon " is like 
having it written on the dome of St. Peter's. Pilgrims 
from all the world admire and behold it. - " Hood dedi- 
cated his Hero and Leander to Coleridge, in a copy of 
verses of which this is the terminus ad quern : 

" But I am thirsty for thy praise, for when 
We gain applauses from the great in name, 
We seem to be partakers of their fame." 

* But which the quizzical orator affected afterwards to explain 
away, by resolving, or expanding and diluting, the " luminous page 
of Gibbon " into vo-luminous. 



PRAISE FROM SIR HUBERT STANLEY.* 311 

Leigh Hunt, too, wrote his Hero and Leander ; and great 
he thought it when told of Wordsworth taking 
down the poem from a bookseller's shelf, to show some 
persons present how swimming ought to be described. 
And of another of his works he tells a friend that 
Wordsworth's expression of a regard for them — " no 
habit, you know, of his, towards my verses M — gave him 
what he is pleased to call " a kind of sneaking satisfac- 
tion," and a "shabby pleasure/' but what was evidently 
above the sneaking or shabby stage, and was to Leontius 
a thing to boast of and a joy for ever. Clarkson Stan- 
field, in a letter of thanks to Etty for spontaneous 
. of one of his pictures, says : "There is nothing so 
gratifying to the feelings of a painter as the praise of his 
brothers in the art, . . . and * approbation from Sir 
Hubert Stanley is praise indeed/ " The one passage or 
phrase that is still remembered in Morton's once popular, 
and not even yet entirely shelved, comedy of A Cure for 
the Heartache is, " Praise from Sir Hubert Stanley" — 
which has passed into a proverb, though very few, 
probably, are aware of its derivation. 

When Garrick, from the iw Pope ID a side box, 

viewing him with a serious and minute attention, the 

Old thrilled like lightning through the 

3 frame, and the latter had some hesitation in 

«ding, from anxiety and from joy. But when, as 

.rd gradually blazed forth, (Richard himself again,) 

and the house was in a roar of applause, and "the 

spiring hand of Pope *' showered him with laurels, well 

: -.id's heart leap; for he worshipped 

genius, and here me, in intent to judge him, in 

ipplaud him, the most notable man of his time. 

Hannah More might well is she says 

she did, with incredulous delight, when Dr. Johnson 
d her Bos bleu with an effusion of flattery (nit- 



3 T2 l LA UDARI A LA UDA TO? 

doing all she had ever received before, all put together : 
" This from Johnson, that parsimonious praiser ! I told 
him I was delighted at his approbation ; he answered 
quite characteristically : 'And so you may, for I give 
you the opinion of a man who does not rate his judg- 
ment in these things very low, I can tell you.' " It was 
a crisis, a turning-point, in the career of Robert Burns, 
when a letter of admiration from Dr. Blacklock opened 
new prospects to his poetic ambition ; for " the Doctor 
belonged to a set of critics for whose applause I had not 
dared to hope." Professor Wilson's praise, " not con- 
veyed in scanty driblets," was gratefully recognized by 
struggling and aspiring members of his class, as equal to 
a house or estate. As dear to poor scholars at the time 
as to Rinaldo that of the preux chevalier, whose " sweet 
words and praises soft," so • made his heart rejoice, the 
more that " well he knew, though much he praised him, 
all his words were true," and for which he returned 
thanks as became giver and receiver, 

" For much it glads me that my power and might 
Ypraised is by such a valiant knight." 

The heart hardly deserves praise, that is not fond of it 
from the worthy, muses the Honourable Miss Byron in 
Richardson's novel. Sir William Jones opines that — 

" Praise, of which virtuous minds may boast, 
They best confer, who merit most." 

And Miss Byron aforesaid, towards the end of her 
almost endless history, discovers a new and keener 
delight in the laudari a laudato, when the praiser is not 
only a Sir Charles Grandison, but her own Sir Charles, 
the nearest to her and the dearest of all human beings : 
" I thought at the time I had a foretaste of the joys of 
heaven. How sweet is the incense of praise from a hus- 
band ; that husband a good man ; my surrounding friends 



THE DEAREST PRAISE OF ALT.. 



enjoying it!" Praise from Sir Hubert Stanley, — the 
adage is a trifle musty ; praise from Sir Charles Grandi- 
son may be grander still ; but the praise lavished by Sir 
Charles on LadyGrandison must be plus ultra, or ne plus. 
Dr. Johnson was delighted when Boswell repeated to 
him what Orme, the historian of Hindostan, had said of 
him — how Orme loved better to hear him talk than 
anybody else, whatever the subject, etc. Because the 
came from a man so respected, it was of high 
account with the great man praised. And we may be 
sure that Boswell repeated the eulogy all the more 
rly, that a week before he had sensibly gratified his 
big friend by telling him what Dunning had just said, — 
" One is always willing to listen to Dr. Johnson." "That 
is a great deal from you, sir," had been BoswelTs remark 
to Dunning ; and Johnson now agreed, "Yes, sir, a great 
deal indeed. Here is a man willing to listen, to whom 
the world is listening all the rest of the year." And 
when Boswell hoped and believed it to be right to tell 
one man of such a handsome thing, said of him by 
another, as tending to increase benevolence, — " Un- 
doubtedly it is right, sir," was the doctor's decisive reply, 
ome natures — not the more vulgar — no praise is 
nearly so dear as that which comes from lips endeared 
by relationship or friendship. Johnson related to 
well, " with amiable fondness," — he was ever tender to 

Jetty — the Story of his wife's gratified pride in The 

Rambler, and his in h< • . Distant praise, from whal 

r, his faithful biographer reflects, IS not SO delight- 
ful as that of a beloved and esteemed wife: "Her 

>n may be said to 'come home to hi 
and b near, its effect IS in Me and per- 

man< \\V find Washington Irving in his fortieth 

. Mr-, rati-. '• how heartfelt is 
n at finding you and my dear sister . 



314 'FAITHFUL ARE THE WOUNDS 

expressing a pride in what I have done, and in what 
others say of me. Believe me, my dear sister, the fondest 
wish of my heart will be gratified if I can enjoy the 
affection of my relatives while living, and leave a name 
that may be cherished by the family when my poor 
wandering life is at an end." Pretty is the picture in 
Longfellow's New England hexameters, of Priscilla the 
spinner, rejoicing in the good word of John Alden— 

" Straight uprose from her wheel the beautiful Puritan maiden, 
Pleased with the praise of her thrift from him whose praise was 
the sweetest." 

Oh ! music of music, — so the author of Christie John- 
stone apostrophizes praise from eloquent lips, and those 
lips, the lips we love. The best of our resolutions, writes 
Henry Mackenzie, are bettered by a consciousness of the 
suffrage of good men in their favour ; and the reward is 
still higher when that suffrage is from those we love. 



XXIX. 

FRIENDLY WOUNDS. 
Proverbs xxvii. 6. 

THE wounds wherewith one has been wounded in 
the house of one's friends, are the cruellest of all, 
piercing even to the dividing asunder of the joints and 
marrow, and of soul and spirit ; for a spirit so wounded 
who can bear ? But then the friends in such a case are 
false friends. Let the friend but be a true one, — loyal, 
single-minded, single-hearted, simply sincere, — and then 
" faithful are the wounds of a friend." A man that is a 
friend must show himself friendly, and even in wound- 
ing he can do so. He must be just the reverse of the 
satirist Atticus, 

" Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike." 



OF A FRIEXD' 315 



He must not fear to deal the necessary stroke, while 
yet it goes utterly against his heart to wound, and it 
would torture himself to give needless pain. He is not 
one of the " righteous" sort against whose "wickedness" 
the psalmist prays, if at least we take the Prayer-Book 
version : " Let the righteous rather smite me friendly 
and reprove me, but let not their precious balms break 
my head : yea. I will pray yet against their wicked: 
Whereas the Bible version has it : " Let the righteous 
smite me ; it shall be a kindness : and let him reprove 
me ; it shall be an excellent oil which shall not break 
my head." That this verse has been generally misun- 
derstood Hengstenberg takes some pains to show ; but 
the literal rectification of its import need not here de- 
tain 

It is not, indeed, the office of a friend, as Jeremy 
Taylc ys to be sour, or at any time morose ; 

but free, open, and ingenuous, candid and humane, " not 
denying to please, but ever refusing to abuse or corrupt." 
He is a miserable man, declares the silver-tongued 
prelate in another place, whom none dares tell of his 
faults so plainly that he may understand his danger ; 
and he that is incapable and impatient of repro< : 
never bee £OOd friend to any man — will "never 

admonish his friend when and if he would, why 

shou id of the same charity?" A 

prominent theist of our day has remarked of the pr 
of the rebukes of Christ, that the attachm 

probably strengthened thereby rather than 

nee the rebukes were c! with that 

frankness of speech which causes men not so much to 

feel hurt by the severity o( the reproof, as interested by 

the jxjintcd application of it, a: iliated by the 

nant int 

Wh have become afterwards, Queen 



3t6 'THE BLAME OF LOVE IS SWEETER 

Elizabeth does appear to have been faithfully the friend 
of Mary Stuart when she thus appealed to her after the 
Darnley catastrophe, but before the damning contents 
of the casket letters were known abroad : " Oh, Madam, 
I should ill fulfil the part either of a faithful cousin or of 
an affectionate friend, if I were to content myself with 
saying pleasant things to you and made no effort to 
preserve your honour. . . . You may have wiser 
councillors than I am — I can well believe it . . . 
while I am sure that you have no friend more true than 
I." Supposing the Queen of Scots to have been really 
free from the deepest shade of guilt, her warmest well- 
wisher could not, Mr. Froude affirms, have written more 
kindly or advised her more judiciously than Elizabeth 
did. Five months later, the Queen of England thus 
began a despatch to Mary in reference to her ill-starred 
marriage with Bothwell : ' Madam, it hath been always 
held for a special principle in friendship, that prosperity 
provideth, but adversity proveth friends ; wherefore 
. . . we have thought meet ... in these few 
words to testify our friendship, not only by admonishing 
you of the worst, but also to comfort you for the best." 
Two things, according to Dr. South, are required in him 
that shall undertake to reprove another ; a confidence 
in, and a kindness to the person whom he reproves ; 
both which qualifications are eminently to be found in 
every real friend. For in whom should a man confide, 
if not in himself? and to whom should he be kind, if not 
to himself ? and is it not a saying as true as it is common, 
that every friend is another self ? But is it possible, the 
old divine goes on to ask, " that that man should truly 
love me that leaves me unguarded and unassisted, when 
the weakness and inadvertency of my own mind would 
expose me, with all my indecencies and imperfections, 
to the observation and derision of the world ? No ; it 



THAN ALL PRAISE OF THOSE 11 HO LOVE NOT.' 317 

is the nature of love to 'cover a multitude of sins;' which 
are by no way :tually concealed and covered from 

the ey^s of others, as by being faithfully discovered and 
laid open to him who commits them." The true friend, 
it is argued, resolves to do the part of a friend, though 

ry doing so makes him forfeit his being thought so. 
jra Leigh welcomes the " blame of love " as 

jter than all praise of those who love not." In a 
more than usually affectionate letter of Arbuthnot's to 
Swift, the genial M.D. tells the ungenial D.D., in an- 

to his melancholy intimations of parting and es- 
trangement, that while he is sure he can never forget 
- vift until he shall meet with (what is impossible) 
another in whose conversation he can delight so much, 

- that the smallest thing he values him for : the 
hearty sincerity of friendship, the plain and open 
ingenuousness of his character, is what he is sure he 

can find in another. " Alas ! I shall often want a 
faithful monitor, one that would vindicate me behind 
my back, and tell me my faults to my face. God 

S I write this with tears in my eyes." How very 

much : would the Dean of St. Patrick's have 

me a friendly fault-tinder! Hard work 

it had been to bring down that haughty spirit to the 

invited by Dr. Young, — 

pride pardon, what thy nature D< 
.nsure of a t'ri 

"When a man be amended. und 

Burke, and by amendment to be preserved, " it becomes 

. friend to urge his faults and vices with all 

enlightened affect paint them in their 

1 bring the moral patient 

^it." The du Friendship, .. mded 

■\ in one of lu's ethical lectures, are 

include the dii md's 



318 FRIENDLY WOUNDS. 

" moral imperfections," — such as, slight at first, may, if 
suffered to continue, vitiate the whole character. " The 
correction of these is our chief duty ; and every effort 
which it is in our power to use for this moral emenda- 
tion, is to be employed sedulously, anxiously, urgently; 
but with all the tenderness which such efforts admit." 
The error is not his alone, we are warned, if the mode 
of remonstrance is calculated to offend — if we make 
him feel more his own imperfection than the tenderness 
of that regard which seeks his amendment above every 
other object. The poets, in the language of Goethe's 
Tasso, — 

" The poets tell us of a magic spear, 
Which could, by friendly contact, heal the wound 
Itself had giv^n. The tongue hath such a power." 

St. Paul, though he made the Corinthians sorry with 
a letter, did not repent, but rather rejoiced, because they 
were made sorry after a godly sort, and felt that faithful 
were the wounds of such a friend. He asked the Gala- 
tians, "Am I therefore become your enemy because I 
tell you the truth ?" Only a feeble pretender to friend- 
ship will flatter at all costs, and abstain with selfish 
timidity from ever hinting a fault, or pointing out an 
inconsistency : 

" Careless how ill I with myself agree, 
Kind to my dress, my figure, not to Me. 
Is this my guide, philosopher, and friend ? 
This he who loves me, and who ought to mend ?" 

Elsewhere the same pen prescribes this couplet : 

"Laugh at your friends, and if your friends are sore, 
So much the better, you may laugh the more," 

because their impatience under reproof would show 
how much there was in them wanting to be set right. 
But the wounds kept open by laughter are scarcely of the 
faithful sort, and the friendly, sanctioned by the proverb. 



REPROVING LIKE A FRIEXD. 319 

There is a general meaning beyond the particular one 
in George's injunction to Richard in Crabbe's Tales of 
the II all:— 

"Faults if you see, and such as must abide, 
Say they are small, or say that I can hide ; 
But faults that I can change, remove, or mend, 
These like a foe detect — or like a friend." 

Clarendon was assured by Charles the Second's Queen 
that "he should never be more welcome to her than 
when he told her of her faults ;" to which the Chan- 
cellor replied, " that it was the province he was accused 
of usurping with reference to all his friends." It requires, 
according to Sir Philip Heme, no ordinary cast of cha- 
racter to enable a man to receive pain from a friend ; 
nor should a friend, he thinks, give it but under peculiar 
circumstances, and where he can at once find good 
qualities in the person he gives it to, and prove his own 
power to acknowledge faults in himself. YValpole, in 
one of his letters to Mason, affects, if it be affectation, 
to thank him for his last epistle "as the kindest possible, 

reprove me like a friend, and nothing comes 
wei me as to be told of my faults," — the great 

Horace's life being, by his own account, to 
d as main' of them as he could. When the Duke 
in Twelfth Night as] . Olivia's jester, " How d< 

thou, my good fellow V* and is answered, " Truly, sir, 
the better for my foes, and the worse for my friends," 

that paradox prompts Orsino to object, "just the con- 
trary; the better for thy friends." " No, sir, the wor 

is the I joinder; and being asked how can that 

be, lanation is read)-: "Many, sir, they praise 

me, .and make an ass of me; now my foes tell me 

plainly I am an ass ; ^<> that by my foes, sir, I profit 
in the I t myself; and by my friends I am 

abused." To the same purport; in a more dignified 



320 TELLING UNPALATABLE TRUTHS. 

strain, is the protest of Moliere's Alceste against the 
flatteries and flatterers cherished by Celimene, to the 
ignoring of those faults which he will not ignore : 

" Et l'on a tort ici de nourrir dans votre ame 
Ce grand attachement aux defauts qu'on y blame. 
# # # * 

Plus on aime quelqu'un, moins il faut qu'on le rlatte; 
A ne rien pardonner le pur amour eclate." 

His exposition of his plain-speaking principles does 
indeed lay him open to Celimene's sprightly retort, that, 
to follow out his precepts, true love ought to renounce 
all tenderness and amiability, and that perfect love 
would assert its supreme privilege and be seen to most 
advantage when roundly abusing, rating, scolding, and 
insulting the beloved object : — 

" Et du parfait amour mettre l'honneur supreme 
A bien injurier les personnes qu'on aime." 

A discriminator between impertinences and disagree- 
able things, observes of the former that it mayor may 
not be true — its main design, independent of truth, is, 
more or less, to insult ; while of a disagreeable thing 
the essence is that it should be true — true in itself, or 
true as representing the speaker's state of feeling. "And 
yet an unpalatable truth is not technically a disagree- 
able thing, any more than an impertinence, though, of 
course, the being told it is an unpleasant operation. It 
is necessary for us, now and then, to hear unpalatable 
and unwelcome truths ; but a disagreeable thing is never 
a moral necessity — it is spoken to relieve the speaker's 
mind, not to profit the hearer/' There are people cha- 
racterized by a certain " crude simplicity of candour/' 
who, as Sydney Smith complained, turn friendship into 
a system of lawful and unpunishable impertinence, feel- 
ing it to be a sufficient and triumphant defence of every 
perpetration of the sort, that it is true. It is charged, 



PEOPLE WHO LIKE TO GIVE PALW 321 

however, against persons of this obtrusive candour that 
they have eves for blemishes only, and are never im- 
pelled to tell pleasant truths — from which characteristic 
is inferred a predominant acerbity of temper, though 
their strictures may be spoken in seeming blunt, honest 
good humour. The Prince in the Story of Rimini is 
describe'.': 

" rude, sarcastic, ever in the vein 

To give the last thing he would suffer — pain." 

Hazlitt somewhere comments on the ways of a set of 
people who are governed by an instinct of the disagree- 
able, by a keen appetite for hurting other people's feel- 
their own being excited and enlivened by the 
shock. They deal in home truths, unpleasant reflec- 
tions, and unwelcome matters of fact ; and the dealing 
is wholesale, as often as not. Mrs. Gore's Wemmersley 
is supremely happy when he has succeeded in inflicting 
•point wounds on the pride of every person present 
in a mixed company. Those who were disposed to 
think the worst of the late Samuel Rogers used to say 
that, by the causticity of his remarks, he delighted in 
tin j though C. R. Leslie asserted, on the con- 
t by the kindliness of his remarks, and still 
by tile kindliness of his acts, what Mr. R 
delighted in was to give pleasure. N6I add think 

of bracketing the poet of the Pleasures of M 'etnory with 

if being pictured by I'Yederic Soulie, into whose 
heart whatever joy found entrance " ne semblait pouvoir 
i^faire qu'autant qu'il en jaillirait line douleur pour 
un autre." Johnson once told his fast friend, Topham 
i 1 lerk, — fast, in the modern si .11 as 

in the raver one, — that he never opened his 

mouth but with intent ; 'and you have- 

often given me pain," the D ' •: added, "not from the 
power of what you Said, but from seeing your intention." 

Y 



322 TAKING PLEASURE IN GIVING PAIN. 

Of Johnson himself it was that the Scotch judge, Lord 
Hailes, comparing him with Swift, observed, that the 
former was a tender-hearted operator, who probed the 
wound only to heal it — faithful are the wounds of a 
friend ; whereas Swift, on the other hand, mangles 
human nature ; cutting and slashing as if he took plea- 
sure in the operation, like the tyrant who said, Ita feri, 
itt se sentiat mori. 

No man, it has been said, will own himself careless 
of giving pain ; nobody acknowledges himself to be an 
habitual offender in this respect. True, there is Milla- 
mant in Congreve who avows pleasure at having sent 
away Mirabell displeased, "for I believe I gave you 
some pain." Mirabell asks if that pleases her. " Infi- 
nitely. I love to give pain." Why should any one take 
pleasure in the pain of another ? is the inquiry of an 
essay-writer on the theme of Malice ; and still more, 
why should any one take pleasure in inflicting pain on 
another ? It is confessedly hard to believe that direct 
pleasure in the pain of another is really part of human 
nature ; but a large class there is at least of people who, 
not actually delighting in the infliction of pain for its 
own sake, do not scruple to inflict it if it incidentally 
promotes their own pleasure. Mrs. Brunton tells us of 
her Lady Pelham in Self -Control, that whatever con- 
ferred the invaluable occasion of tormenting, was che- 
rished by her as the dearest of her concerns. " Could 
Lady Pelham's end have been pursued without annoy- 
ance to any living being, it would long before have 
shared the perishable nature of her other purposes." 
There are people who are conscious and proud of the 
faculty of giving pain, who have what a dissector of their 
morbid anatomy calls a morbid appetite for making 
people uneasy about them, and to whom a comfortable 
person is an eyesore. Miss Martineau affirms a multi- 



IMPISH TEXDEXCY TO TEASE. 323 

tude of Samuel Rogers's sayings to be rankling still in 
people's memories, which could not possibly have had 
any other origin than the Ic ; pain — some 

; indeed so atrocious as to suggest the idea that he 
had a sort of psychological curiosity to see how people 
could bear such inflictions. The art of giving annoy- 

:ion has perhaps scarcely re- 
I the attention which k a — there bein 

an ironical writer on the subject observes, no general 
theory of the " .hod of putting your friends out of 

temper, and s. iiem away with an acute 

though it is admitted as true that some 
persons have reached a very high degree of skill in this 
of a purely empirical kind hov. getting to 

know each other's weak point, and running pins into 
tender places with as much discrimination as any witch- 
finder of former times. Young people in general, and 
in particular, are charged ! on social 

a pronounced liking for this sort of thing ; 
ing in them an impish tendency that makes 
of exqi light to them : let a 

r into the secret of a v . or a 

if he can resist the temptation of torturing 
you a ult of his knowledge, he may lay claim to 

.'.most unknown in boyish morals. " Girls are 
cruel ; th< bout it. If more \ 

imply indifferent to the 
of a more active temperament, they find a 
Lin. A girl wil 
cruel things 1 then laugh 

at ho The goo itan who 

mds is reputed better than 

on the 
; but the LevitC : reputed better th;.\ 

of oil, should pour in \ .nd brine. 



324 ART OF REPREHENDING WITHOUT OFFENDING. 

If there be any foundation for a comparison between 
unpleasant truths and doses of medicine, is there, as a 
discourser on plain-dealing asks, to be no judgment in 
the times and seasons of administering them ? Are we 
to be for ever indiscriminately physicking our friends, 
just because we happen to have a few spare drugs on 
hand, or a little spare time for dispensing them ? " The 
simples which, on general grounds, would seem most 
suitable, are constantly found to disagree in particular 
cases." Owen Feltham, who asserts that to reprehend 
well is the most necessary and the hardest part of friend- 
ship, grants that there is a manner of reprehending which 
turns a benefit into an injury ; and then, says he, it both 
strengthens error and wounds the giver. " It ought to 
be in season, neither when the brain is muddled with 
rising fumes, nor when the mind is maddened with 
ungovernable passions. Certainly, he is drunk himself 
that so profanes reason as to urge it to a drunken man." 
Tedious admonitions, he elsewhere says, at once stupify 
the advised, and make the giver contemptible : it is the 
short reproof, which stays like a stab in the memory, 
that tells ; and oftentimes three words do more good 
than an idle discourse of three hours. The St. Cyran 
of Claude Lancelot's portraiture is a man who rebukes 
vice far less by stern rebuke than by the contrast of his 
own serene aspect. So of St. Francis Xavier we read 
that his very face was as a mirror reflecting by the force 
of contrast all the hideousness of the King of Bungo's 
vices ; though, in this case, " faithful were the rebukes 
of the tongue, no less than of the countenance, of 
Xavier ; " and it is on record that the royal offender 
was at length touched and awed. Feltham reckons it 
judicious, when dealing with one's superior, to manage 
reproof sometimes in parables, as Nathan to David, and 
so let him by the application give himself the censure. 



'FAITHFUL ARE THE WOUNDS OF A FRIEND: 3 = 5 

Chaucer's model Good Parson sought to draw folk 
heavenward by benign teaching and good ensample : — 

" But it were eny persone obstinat, 
What so he were of high or low estat, 
Him wolde he snybbe scharply for the nones, 
:re preest I trovve ther nowher is." 

Izaak Walton touches lovingly on Bishop Sanderson's 
way, as a parish priest, of begetting in offenders a devout 
contrition — which includes the taking them, "though 
never so poor," to dinner with him, "using them friendly," 
and dismissing them with his blessing, and persuasions 
to a virtuous life, and begging them for their own sakes 
to believe him. It is further noted of him that when, as 
proctor at Oxford, he met in his night-walk with " irre- 
gular scholars," he would send for them next morning, 
and, "convinced them with such obligingness, and rea- 
son added to it, that they parted from him with such 
resolutions as the man after God's own heart was pos- 
1 with when he said, ' There is mercy with Thee, 
and therefore Thou shalt be feared.' " He would have- 
to the letter every syllable of Jeremy Taylor's 
injunction against a habit of reproving one's brother for 
'lung, but for great things only; for this is the 
I tutor, not of a friend ; and few men will suffer 
themselv >ide always under pupilla; 

it has been truly said, feels how difficult 

1 even to our nearest friends the whole truth 

about their faults and foibles: one wanders round .md 

! it, nibbles at it, makes little mentions into it, 
then hurriedly , and loses no time in enveloping 

If in a cL complimentary dust "One 

a v. h >1( , >me rebuke, then anx 

flf the veil from hidden errors with one hand, 
and with the other tenderly replaces it — in short, blows 

in the same moment" I'm- a man docs 



not like to lose his friend ; and very few friendships 
would endure a week, we are assured, if friends affec- 
tionately but unreservedly told each other all their 
faults ; besides that, most men really feel a little shy in 
pointing out errors and infirmities, even from the best 
of motives, of which, or of the like of which, they are 
tolerably sure of being quite as guilty themselves. 
And then, again, there is that "reluctance to see a 
person uncomfortable or unhappy which deters many 
from doing their duty to those about them, and ulti- 
mately causes tenfold more discomfort and misery than 
that which it temporarily averts." A late Professor of 
Moral Philosophy pronounces him who refrains from the 
duty of friendly rebuke, because he fears to give pain 
to one he loves, to be guilty of the same weakness 
which, in a case of bodily accident or disease, would 
" withhold the salutary potion, because it is nauseous, or 
the surgical operation which is to preserve life, and to 
preserve it with comfort, because the use of the instru- 
ment, which is to be attended with relief and happiness, 
implies a little momentary addition of suffering." He 
who cannot endure that one whom he hails his friend 
should perceive his irritability, or his sullenness, or his 
indolence, or his over-rashness of tongue, or whatever 
his chief admitted weakness may be, is pronounced 
something of a fool, and to be pretty certain to go 
friendless in the end. South speaks of few people being 
able, and fewer willing, to put themselves to so 
great an inconvenience as fault-finding for another's 
good, and to raise a storm about their own ears, to do 
an " odious ungrateful piece of service for an ungrateful 
person ; " and therefore, says he, men usually deal with 
such currish sharp natures as they do with mastiffs, — 
" they are fain to stroke them, though they deserve to 
be cudgelled." " To attempt to advise them out of their 



ok to perish in the add: 
I to be torn in pie; his pains." But South 

wo his prac: 

reprove not 
for reproof 

\ ) be pr 
up its weight when there 

lsoo for ..ip. charity, and 

lias 
a k ind 

st the proposed 

art and practice of r 

. :-ds from a 
I 
- 
an th bad sauce." His 

the good - 

: the unhap 

be more 
egar or 
he c i much to b ■ on 

:an 

.nd 
I in 

of spea a 

man's heart to such pachy- 



328 RO UGH AND RE A D Y REB UKE. 

derms would be so sensitively thin-skinned an organiza- 
tion as that of Madame d'Houdetot, as described by 
Madame Remusat, who tells us, " Nous l'avons vue 
souffrir, . . . souffrir reellement, lorsqu'on expri- 
mait le moindre blame devant elle ; elle 

montrait tout simplement la peine qu'on lui faisait 
eprouver." But this was morbid sensibility. An every 
way healthier type of the soul feminine than Madame's 
we have in excellent and exemplary Mistress Evelyn, of 
whom and of whose tact in letter-writing Dr. Bohun 
bears record, that " the reproofs in any of these numer- 
ous letters were so softly insinuated, that the greatest 
punishment to be inflicted upon any disobligation was 
only to have the contrary virtue to the fault they had 
been guilty of, highly applauded in the next correspond- 
ence, which was ever so managed as to please and 
improve/' Margaret Fuller was noted for her readiness 
to reprove, in more direct and punitive fashion : she 
would call any offender to instant account, and rebuke 
him before all. Her biographers mention various cases 
of her reproof being taken well, and answering the 
purpose ; one instance is of a pronounced censure on a 
male culprit, " and there was not a particle of ill-will 
in it ; but it was truth which she could not help see- 
ing and uttering, nor he refuse to accept ; " — another 

instance at Paris, where a " Mr. ■ was struck dumb " 

by her invective, " his eyes fixed on her with wonder 
and amazement, yet gazing too with an attention which 
seemed like fascination." When she had done, he still 
looked to see if she had more to say, and when he found 
she had really finished, he arose, took his hat, said 
faintly, " I thank you," and left the room. He after- 
wards said to a friend, " I shall never speak ill of her. 
She has done me good/' But one rather mistrusts the 
man, especially as " unveracity" is specially charged 



TEXDER AXD TIMELY EXPOSTULATION. 329 

against him. As for the faintly uttered " thanks/' they 
may have been rather for finding the lecture over, than 
for the lecture itself. Evidently the strong-minded lady 
would not mince her words, or adopt the tone of my 
Lord Chesterfield, who, in a letter promising or menac- 
ing a frank system of fault-finding, engages not to 
administer emetics and cathartics, but only mild altera- 
" Frequent reproofs, corrections, and admonitions 
will be necessary ; but then, I promise you that they 
shall be in a gentle, friendly, and secret manner; they 
shall not put you out of countenance in company, nor 
out of humour when we are alone.'' The politest oi 
lettered peers does his spiriting so gently that we must 
insert a not before the word u harshly " and indeed 
qualify the entire passage, if we apply to him at all a 
passage that is in bits exquisitely inapplicable, from the 
dramatic fragments of a now venerable poet : 

" In this case, 

A father, full of truth, has checked his son ; 
lily perhaps ; for many a benefit 
^ on the visor of a stern reproof: 
Hut oh ! within, (as roughest rinds conceal 

tenderest kernels.) gentle thoughts abide ; 
1 meanings ; seeds that, if the soil be sure, 
Will bring forth fruits of wisdom.'' 

It is the expostulation of a brother, Sir James Stephen 
exclaims, in reference to a venerable philanthropist ; mi- 
me truth Is delivered with scrupulous fidelity, and 
yet with a tenderness which demonstrates that the 
• eels the pain which he reluctantly inflicts. 
Sydney Smith was afraid of friendship being turned by 
.stem of lawless ami unpunishable 
rtinence : W friends, he said, will bear to be 

• f their faults ; and if done at all, it must be done 
with infinite man and delicacy ; for if you in- 

dulge often in this practice, men think you hate, and 



33o A LOVING FRIEND'S REBUKE. 

avoid you. We read of Channing when at school, — 
where he was known as " Peacemaker" and "Little 
King Pepin," — that he made a point of rebuking among 
his schoolmates every sally that touched on the profane 
or the licentious, and this in so gentle a tone, manifestly 
so much more in sorrow than in anger, that the censure 
was well taken. Perthes was noted for a certain aptness 
for reproof — a " bold freshness," is said to have " charac- 
terized his youth," in this respect ; and " in administering 
reproof Perthes generally hit the nail on the head." 
Against insolence, falsehood, and baseness, he to the last 
would " blaze up instantly and vehemently," even when 
under no apparent obligation to speak. Prior echoes 
Cicero in the assertion that 

"Of all the gifts the gods afford 
(If we may take old Tully's word) 
The greatest is a friend ; whose love 
Knows how to praise, and when reprove." 

A loving friend's rebuke is a rebuke — sinks into the 
heart, and convinces the judgment ; an enemy's or 
stranger's rebuke, adds Mr. Charles Reade, " is invective, 
and irritates — not converts." " This from a friend ! " 
cries angered Antony, in Dryden's Roman tragedy ; 
and Dolabella answers, 

"Yes, Antony, a true one ; 
A friend so tender, that each word I speak 
Stabs my own heart before it reach your ear. 
Oh, judge me not less kind because I chide ! " 



XXX. 

SA TED J J 'ITU S UPERFL UITY. 
Proverbs x.wii. 7. 

WHILE to the hungry soul every bitter thing even 
et, the full soul loatheth an honeycomb. 
Sated wit! . the sweetest of things is, to the 

felted, than insipid, — it is sickening. Enough is 

as good as a feast, and better than a feast of which the 
r is too full. To know when to stop is an essential 
rule in the epicurean art. Extremes meet, and to be 
I me with dainties is to be overcome with disgust. 
thou honey, because it is good ; and the honey- 
comb, which is sweet to thy taste." But that the honey 
-till be accounted good, and honeycomb remain 
t to thy taste, (What is sweeter than honey ? runs 
Samson's riddle,) so eat of them as not to be sated with 
ick of them, so eat as not to provoke a surfeit, a 
turning of the stomach, a revolting and reaction of dis- 
of any and every kind of food as not to 
' any and even- other. For, to be stuffed 
full, however it may have come about, is ipso fok 

the choicest of cates, so that 
one loath I dainty of them all. 

'■ 'I'. ney 

Is loathsome in his own deliciousness, 

I in the taste confounds the appeti: 

because, as Mr. Dalla the sensation, the pro- 

leasure ; a pain, which is 

afterwards through menv 1 with the return 

of the ph : 1 >f the 

Prelu :sr, and 



332 l TOUJOURS PERDRIX: 

even, if too long regarded, afflict the mind with fond 
unrest ; 

" Whate'er the uplooking soul admires, 
Whate'er the senses' banquet be, 
Fatigues at last with vain desires, 
Or sickens by satiety." 

The sated yet insatiable old sensualist in Shelley's 
tragedy professes, or confesses, 

u When I was young I thought of nothing else 
But pleasure ; and I fed on honey sweets : 
Men, by St Thomas J cannot live like bees, 
And I grew tired." 

There are flowers whose scent is so luscious that, as 
Mr. Charles Kingsley says, silly children will plunge 
their heads among them, drinking in their odour, to the 
exclusion of all fresh air : on a sudden, sometimes, 
comes a revulsion of the nerves : the sweet odour 
changes in a moment to a horrible one ; and the child 
cannot bear for years after the scent which has disgusted 
it by over sweetness. 

A French proverb exists which hints, as an English 
paraphrase of it runs, that partridges unvaryingly served 
up at table during the whole of September may be ad- 
vantageously replaced by some other plat during the 
month which follows. Toujours pei'drix. Even on canvas 
this was found too much for Spain and the Spaniards 
to stomach — witness their protest against the invariable 
partridge (plus a cat - and a dog) introduced by the 
painter royal, El Mudo (J. H. Naverete), as pictorial 
accessories sine quibus non. The Spanish Titian was 
even compelled to bind himself in a contract with King 
Philip to give up the partridge (and puss). Fenimore 
Cooper describes the meanest dweller in Oswego of old 
as habitually feasting on game that would have formed 



TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THIXG 333 

the boast of a Parisian table ; and it was no more than 
a healthful commentary on the caprices of taste, and of 
the waywardness of human desires, that the very diet 
which in other scenes would have been deemed the sub- 
ject of envy and repinings, got to pall on the appetite. 
He tells us how the coarse and regular food of the army, 
which it became necessary, at the time in question, to 
husband, on account of the difficulty of transport, rose 
in the estimation of the common soldier, who would at 
any time cheerfully desert his venison, and ducks, and 
pigeons, and salmon, to banquet on the sweets of pickled 
pork, stringy turnips, and half-cooked cabbage. Even 
an alderman has been known to weary of too unvarying 
a round of civic banquets, and to be not unwilling to 
allot one evening in seven to a beneficial change from 
turtle and champagne to roast mutton and pale sherry. 
So has it been surmised by apologists for literature not 
of the highest class of all, that the maximum of intellect 
If, perhaps, weary of the maximum of intel- 
lectual enjoyment, and crave from time to time permis- 
our to a less refined but more substantial diet. 

n objects that originally excited the highest interest, 
will, :: mtinued, cease to interest, and soon become 

even painful. The most beautiful couplet of the most 
beautiful poem, as 1 >r. T. Brown suggests, if repeated to 
ithout intermission, for a very few minutes, would 
excite more uneasiness than could have been felt from 
a single recitation of the dullest stanza of the most 

►rific inditer of rhymes. 

r porridge — either is good In its way, but 

of either < v have too much. That i festive 

Sir Walter & ott tells of a lunatic patient lie knew 

in the Edinburgh Infirmary, who took the hospital and 

ints t" be his own large establishment, reflecting his 

own wealth and grandeur, but who was puzzled by one 



334 STOMACHS CLOGGED WITH COSTLY FARE. 

thing. Though provided, as he said, with a first-rate 
cook and proper assistants, and though his table was 
regularly supplied with every delicacy of the season, yet 
he confessed that, by some uncommon depravity of the 
palate, everything which he ate " tasted of porridge." 
That was because he was fed upon nothing else — le 
pauvre homme ! 

The priest's slave, in Horace, tired of living on the 
delicacies offered to his master's god, runs away from his 
service, that he may get a little common bread. Pane 
egeojam mellitis potiore placentis — placenta being cheese- 
cakes, and cheesecakes are cloying for a continuance. 
They may soon cease to be placenda. Well says Swift, 
that— 

" To stomachs clogg'd with costly fare 
Simplicity alone is rare ; 
While high, and nice, and curious meats 
Are really but vulgar treats." 

Moliere's Marquis protests with effusion, when inviting 
himself to a humble, pot-luck sort of dinner-table, quite 
out of his way, Je siris des grands repas fatigue, je te 
jure. To apply what Moliere's Mercure says in another 
comedy, Tels changements out lenrs doucetirs, qici passent 
indeed V intelligence of the uninitiated. It was Byron's 
boast, that the day he came of age he dined on eggs and 
bacon and .a bottle of ale ; and this favourite fare (which 
by no means agreed with him) he afterwards reserved 
for great occasions, once in four or five years or so. 
Genuine enough was his appreciation of the whim of 
his friend Matthews (who gave him and Hobhouse such 
a " splendid entertainment " before they set out for Con- 
stantinople) for dining at all sorts of out-of-the-way 
places ; somebody once popping upon him in a cheap 
Strand eatinghouse, where the alleged attraction was, 
that he paid a shilling to dine with his hat on. A pic- 



PLAIX DIET I ' OF A RELIEF. 

nic, which is a temporary return to an aboriginal con- 
dition, - unfamiliarity, as Mr. Herbert 
Spencer it would not 
have it in his - 

• >ronounces the satisfactions of the 

:ral appetite, in a pL. to be infinite :id 

the i uit luxury, 

as the I are apt to perceive upon 

occ. .ced in people bre 

but to pre- 

E natural cou 
or for a s on a journey or a day of sport, c. 

ace: eet of a plain di 

abstinence and 
have with freedom owned that it was then tb 

.nd delight which a table could 

i friend told Mr. Dallas that he never 

as a barley bannock and 

who 

ant! 

food h.. 

most labou "Herri mutton, 

uch 
kilfully 
I le th .; jht i: v. ml I ' ent 

to introduc nail 



336 HOMELY FARE WELCOME AS A CHANGE. 

parties to plain savoury dinners, which might not super- 
sede more expensive repasts, but might be adopted as a 
variety and a relief. Relief and variety, — that is the 
question, and there's the rub. The philosophy of the 
matter may be expressed in M. de Segur's suggestive 
remark, that " On trouve du plaisir a. descendre tant qu'on 
croit pouvoir remonter des qu'on le veut." The philoso- 
phy is, in fact, simply that of the French proverb, that 
'tis easy to go afoot, when one leads one's horse by the 
bridle, — an adage which has been justly praised as 
setting at their true worth many cheap humilities ; so 
easy it is to stoop from state, when that state may be 
resumed at will ; so easy for one to part with luxuries 
and indulgences, which he only parts with exactly so 
long as it may please himself. Even 

" The gentlest shade that walked Elysian plains 
Might sometimes covet dissoluble chains ; 
Even for the tenants of the zone that lies 
Beyond the stars, celestial Paradise, 
Methinks 'twould heighten joy, to overleap 
At will the crystal battlements, and peep 
Into some other region, though less fair, 
To see how things are made and managed there. 
Change for the worse might please," — 

provided always that change back again were practicable 
at a minute's notice. A passage in Moore's Diary, 
relating to a confluence of great folks at his little cot- 
tage, comprises mention of " Lady Caroline offering to 
join the party, and eat an Irish stew in an entresol, by 
way of novelty." And by way of novelty no doubt 
it would go down well. When little Eglantine the 
perfumer is envious to learn from Mr. Walker — not 
our Original guide, philosopher, and friend, but the 
titular captain in Mr. Thackeray's novelet — what might 
be the carte, now, of his yesterday's dinner with the 
marquises and earls, and ventures to take turtle and 






CLOYED APPETITE PIQUED BY PLAIX EAR 

venison for granted, to begin with, — " Psha ! we're sick 
of i cries the captain : " We had pea-soup and 

boiled tripe. What do you think of that ? We had 
sprats and herrings, a bullock's heart, a baked shoulder 
of mutton and potatoes, pig's head, and Irish stew. / 
ordered the dinner, sir, and got more credit for inventing 
it than they ever gave to Vdc or Soyer. The marquis 
■s, the earl devoured half a bushel of 
sprats, and if the viscount is not laid up with a surfeit of 
bullock's heart, my name's not Howard Walker" — which 
the way, christianly speaking, it was not ; but 
Kquivocal authority as this gentleman may 
his author, Mich lo Titmarsh, discussed the 

subject with equal unction and decision, at sundry times 
and in divers humours, as the humours took him and the 
tim It is upon the sham side of the alleged 

h that he loved to expatiate. As where he apostro- 
phizes that Mr. Brandon who flowers into the full-blown 
Dr. Firmin of a later fiction: "It was only because 
ipetite was long unused to this simple 
n a relish for it ; and I thought 
t Saturday, at .Mr. L< ■. West 

rn, .Black wall, where a company of fifteen 
:orned the turtle, p the 

punch, anl iy the whitebait, did suddenly and 

make a rush upon— a dish of deans and 
//." In one of the Brown letters, our literal}' man 
and practised diner-out expounds t' 
trine that t'. . — by which he 

lie, 

-buttled air, if \ 

he full as good as chai :: — nor \. 

man who. Upon .1 knoll with I 

1 draught of bitter beer From the pannier thai curies 
la well that, though this he the 



338 ZEST OF NOVELTY IN HOMELY FARE. 

there, he maintained, any delicacy in the world produci- 
ble by Monsieur Francatelli or Monsieur Soyer, which 
was really better than toasted cheese. Had he not seen 
a dozen of epicures at a grand table forsake every French 
and Italian delicacy for boiled leg of pork and pease 
pudding ? If we small folks receive great folks at our 
houses, he is for laying a wager that they will select 
mutton and gooseberry tart for their dinner, forsaking 
the entrees which the men in white Berlin gloves are 
handing round in the Birmingham plated dishes. 
Asking lords and ladies, who have big establishments of 
their own, to French dinners and dainties, he likens to 
inviting a grocer to a meal of figs, or a pastrycook to a 
banquet of raspberry tarts : they have had enough of 
them. Mr. Hayward propounds it as a secret worth 
knowing in a luxurious metropolis, that nothing is so 
attractive to the wealthy as a plain dinner and a small 
party : the noble proprietor of half a dozen princely 
residences, says he, will thank you with an effusion of 
gratitude for asking him to such a dinner — an occurrence 
perhaps unique in his long life of aristocratic banqueting. 
It is not a very new remark, as Mr. Shirley Brooks 
reminds us, that those' who are accustomed to luxuries 
and comforts are often better able to endure privations 
than those to whom such matters are greater rarities ; 
anybody who has had the misfortune to make a rough 
journey with his servant has made the observation ; and 
it is said to have occurred to the Duke of Wellington, 
when certain dandy officers of his gracefully compli- 
mented the horse steaks, while the privates were almost 
in mutiny against their rations. In his celebrated Re- 

which for the moment he prefers, there are liquids beyond it in 
taste. . . . The deliberate selection of the lower form of 
pleasure does not interfere with our estimate of the higher." — E. S. 
Dallas, The Gay Science, vol. i., p. 151. 



SATED WITH SUPERFLUITY. 339 

flections upon Exile, Lord Bolingbroke tells us of the 
rich, " whose wanton appetites neither the produce of one 
country nor of one part of the world can satisfy," and 
for whom the whole habitable globe is ransacked, for 
whom the caravans of the East are continually in march, 
and the remotest seas are covered with ships, that 
" these pampered creatures, sated with superfluity, are 
often glad to inhabit a humble cot, and to make a 
homely meal. They run for refuge into the arms of 
frugality cribing those abysses of darkness in the 

old to . linburgh, called " laigh shops/' where 

hionable folks of the last century used to regale 
themselves with raw oysters and porter, arranged in 
;e dishes upon a coarse table, in a dingy room, lighted 
by tallow candles, Dr. R. Chambers plausibly surmises 
that the rudeness of the feast and the vulgarity of the 
surroundings may have given a zest to its enjoyment, 
with which more refined banquets could not have been 
accompanied. 

Wl. seph II. and the Czarina, autocrat of 

all the let at Kaidak in 1787, there was 

difficult ph's precipitancy of movement, 

in procuring these august personages even a scanty 

meal. Such as it was, however, the two sovrans conde- 

:i preparing it, and found the prepa- 

it fun ;" and when the repast was 

they for it, they fell to with a will ; 

rian of the House of Austria words the 

of that "scanty meal," they "partook of it with 

aient than the)' had i rived from the 

• the table." Montaigne points a tno- 

tO princes di . 
their qualiti 
ice, and stooping to the poor and ordinary 
life of the 1 people. As in 1 1 



340 ' PLERUMQUE GRAT^E DIVITIBUS VICES: 

" Plerumque gratae divitibus vices, 
Mundaeque parvo sub lare pauperum 
Ccense, sine aulaeis et ostro, 
Sollicitam explicuere frontem." 

Which has been freely Englished : 

" Changes have often pleased the great ; 
And in a cell a homely treat 

Of healthy food and cleanly dressed 
Though no rich hangings grace the rooms, 
Or purple wrought in Tyrian looms, 

Have smoothed a wrinkled brow and calmed a ruffled 
breast." 

Mr. Pepys in his Diary took particular notice of the 
fact that, in the memorable May of 1660, " the King and 
the two Dukes," before landing in merry England, to 
enjoy their own again, " did eat their breakfast, . . . 
and there being set some ship's diet before them, only 
to show them the manner of the ship's diet, they did eat 
of nothing else but pease and pork, and boiled beef." 
Every man Jack in the fleet must have felt flattered at this 
august election of junk. Some three years later we find 
the Diarist at Chelsea, with the Earl of Sandwich "all 
alone with one joynt of meat at dinner, and mightily ex- 
tolling the goodness of his diet." Another twelvemonth, 
and we light on Mr. Pepys's own proper personal confes- 
sion, " To dinner with my wife, to a good hog's harslet, 
a piece of meat I love, but have not eat of I think these 
seven years." Yet a lustrum, as time is told, and we 
revert to junk at sea. " The boatswain of the ship did 
bring us out of the kettle a piece of hot salt beef, and 
some brown bread and brandy ; and there we did make 
a little meal, but so good as I never would desire to eat 
better meat while I live, only I would have cleaner 
dishes." Mr. Pepys was too familiar with the literature 
of his day, and too well acquainted with the writings of 
Dryden, as well as with the man, not to have read, and 



HEART RESPOXSIVE TO HEART. 341 

having read to cordially agree with, a passage in Glorious 
John's prologue to All for Love ; or, The World Well 
Lost, accepted now as incomparably the best of his 
pla\ 

'* The rich, when tired with daily feasts, 

For change, become their next poor tenant's guests ; 
Drink hearty draughts of ale from plain brown bowls, 
And saatch the homely rasher from the coals.'' 



XXXI. 

HEART RESPOXSIVE TO HEART. 

Proverus xvii. 19. 

\7\ARIOUS are the interpretations put upon the 
proverb, "As in water face answereth to face, so 
the heart of man to man ; " and of these some are un- 
:y enough. Castalio understands by it, that 
: may know what kind of face he hath, if he 
will ! 1 the water ; so may he know what kind 

of man he is, if he will examine his conscience. Bishop 
of the passage seems nearer the mark: 
"A mail may see himself, while he looks upon other 
men, as well as know other men by considering his own 
inclin I is prop fever, in this place, to 

.- in the sense of the ready respon 
..art in a matter of common feeling, the 

: heart to heart in r< f natural emotion. 

What ' from one heart lit to 

illeth unto deep. And the call Is a; 

once heard, and 1 rered. One touch of 

natur< the whole world kin. Not that the famous 

ilus mi ■' ida really has 

the ip imonly I upon it ; for, 



342 ONE TOUCH OF NATURE. 

as a discerning critic long ago pointed out, the line in 
question has nothing whatever to do with a general 
bonhomie arising from the successful touch of a uni- 
versally responsive chord ; it says only that all men 
have a touch of family resemblance, and the following 
lines point out that this touch is the love and worship 
of novelty and change. 

In the Introductory Discourse to her elaborately de- 
signed series of Plays on the Passions, Miss Baillie 
expatiates on the fact, that from the strong sympathy 
felt by most creatures, but the human above all, for 
others of their kind, nothing has become so much an 
object of man's curiosity as man himself; every person 
who is not deficient in intellect being more or less oc- 
cupied in tracing among the individuals he converses 
with, the varieties of understanding and temper which 
constitute the characters of men, and receiving great 
pleasure from every stroke of nature that points out to 
him those varieties. " In a work abounding with the 
marvellous and unnatural, if the author has anyhow 
stumbled upon an unsophisticated genuine stroke of 
nature, we shall immediately perceive and be delighted 
with it, though we are foolish enough to admire, at the 
same time, all the nonsense with which it is surrounded." 
In novels, those works, she contends, which most 
strongly characterize human nature in the middling 
and lower classes of society, where it is to be discovered 
by stronger and more unequivocal marks, will ever be 
the most popular. Into whatever scenes the novelist 
may conduct us, what objects soever he may present to 
our view, still is our attention most sensibly awake to 
every touch faithful to nature ; still are we upon the 
watch for everything that speaks to us of ourselves. 
In the " fair field of what is properly called poetry," 
in the enchanted regions of simile, metaphor, and 



HEART RESPOXSIVE TO HEART. 343 

allegory, among heroes and nymphs, " amidst all this 
decoration and ornament, all this loftiness and refine- 
ment, let one simple trait of the human heart, one 
expression of passion, genuine and true to nature, be 
introduced, and it will stand forth alone in the boldness 
of reality, while the false and unnatural around it fade 
away upon every side, like the rising exhalations of the 
morning." One may apply the words of Emerson : 
" It is only to these simple strokes that the highest 
power belongs, — when a weak hand touches, point by 
point, the eternal beams and rafters on which the whole 
structure of Nature and society is laid." The genius 
which commands our applause, says Dr. Thomas Brown, 
is still the genius of a man : we see our common nature 
reflected, though with a beauty of which we were not 
sensible before ; ceasing to recognize spontaneously our 
common nature, we feel for the work in question " that 
coldness which it is impossible for us not to feel with 
respect to everything which is absolutely foreign." A 

d of Mr. Swinburne's Tragedies left on Professor 
Lowell an impression of a world of shadows, inhabited 
by less substantial things than that nether realm in 
Homer where the very eidolon of Achilles is still real 
to us in its longings and regrets. But, ''there are some 
touches of nature in the mother's memories of Althaea,* 

vctly pathetic that they go as right to the heart as 

came from it, and are neither Greek nor English, 
but broadly human." As the pathetic, observes Words- 
worth in one of his Prefaces, participates of an "animal" 

lion, it might seem that, if the spri this emo- 

• genuine, all men, possessed <»f competent 

know' f the facts and circumstances, would be 

[y affected ; and, doubtless, he add 

* Swinburne's Aialanta in Caly 



344 TEARS INFECTIOUS. 

the works of every true poet will be found passages 
of that species of excellence which is proved by effects 
immediate and universal." Every true poet has more 
or less command over the rock whence waters rush 
out — more or less mastery of the key that opes the 
fount of sympathetic tears. Tears are notably in- 
fectious. The great poets all know that Andromache, 
after parting with Hector, seeks her own palace, to weep 
there ; and " through all her train the soft infection " 
runs. Achilles weeps at Priam's pleading ; and " th' in- 
fectious softness through the heroes " runs again, as Mr. 
Pope words it. Helen, in "pomp of grief" appears, and 
bewails her desolateness, with sorrow-streaming eye : 
" Distressful beauty melts each stander-by ; on all around 
th' infectious sorrow grows." Homeric in simplicity at 
least are such old chroniclers as Villehardouin, in whose 
pages we so often meet with such passages as this : " Et 
alors, les six deputes pleurant beaucoup, le doge et tous 
les autres commencerent a pleurer de la pitie qu'ils en 
eurent." Prospero, with all his self-command, cannot 
refrain from tears when the greybeard counsellor from 
Naples, one honest man saved in the Tempest, is seen 
to shed some : 

" Holy Gonzalo, honourable man, 
Mine eyes, even sociable to the show of thine, 
Fall fellowly drops." 

Sigismunda's maids, in Dryden's adaptation from Boc- 
caccio, as, bewildered, they gazed on their weeping 
mistress, " by infection wept." In his adaptation from 
Chaucer, when the " stern Athenian prince " dooms 
Palamon and Arcite, " dumb sorrow seized the standers- 

by: 

" The queen, above the rest, by nature good, 
(The pattern formed of perfect womanhood) 
For tender pity wept : when she began, 
Through the bright quire the infectious virtue ran." 



HEART RESPONSIVE TO HEART. 545 

When Corporal Trim tells the story of Le Fevre, and 
comes to the lieutenant's son taking hold of his hand, 
and bursting into tears, " I never, in the longest march," 
said the corporal, " had so great a mind for my dinner, 
as I had to cry with him for company. What could be 
the matter with me, an' please your honour ? " " No- 
thing in the world, Trim/' said my Uncle Toby, blowing 
his nose, "but that thou art a good-natured fellow/' 
Ariste, in Cresset's Le Mediant, is clear, on similar 
grounds, 

ic l'homme n'est point fait pour la mcchancdc. 
Consultez, ecoutcz pour juges, pour oracles, 
Lcs homines rassembles ; voyez a nos spectacles, 

nd on peint quelque trait de candeur, de bonte, 
Oil brille en tout son jour la tendre humanitc, 
Tous lcs coeurs sont remplis d'une volupte pure, 
Et e'est la qu'on cntend le cri de la nature.'' 

One of Hawthorne's descriptions of clerical life in 
Id time of the New World concerns certain "true 
saintly fathers," in whom the one thing lacking was the 
gift that descended at Pentecost in tongues of flame, 
symbolizing the power of addressing the whole human 
brotherhood in the heart's native language : their voices 
came as from afar, and came not home; whereas that 
of a less saintly brother did : his very sense of frailty 
kept him down on a level with the lowest, and his 

sympathies were intimate with the sinful brotherhood 

of mankind, "SO that his heart vibrated in unison with 

I sent its own throb of pain through a thousand 

other hearts," in gushes of persuasive eloquence — per- 

e de profundtSy from the great heart which 

at bottom the wide world over, 

live author dwells Significantly upon 

the rich endowment .Arthur Dimmesdale possessed in 

peculiar voice" — for a listener even who 



346 GENUINE STROKES OF NATURE. 

comprehended nothing of the language in which that 
preacher spoke, might still, we are assured, have been 
swayed to and fro by the mere tone and cadence of his 
vocal organ : like all other music, it breathed passion 
and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue 
native to the human heart, wherever educated. " And 
yet, majestic as the voice sometimes became, there was 
for ever in it an essential character of plaintiveness. A 
loud or low expression of anguish, — the whisper, or the 
shriek, as it might be conceived, of suffering humanity, 
that touched a sensibility in every bosom." What was 
it ? The complaint of a human heart, sorrow-laden, 
perchance guilty, telling its secret, whether of guilt or 
sorrow, to the great heart of mankind ; beseeching its 
sympathy or forgiveness, — at every moment, — in each 
accent, — and never in vain. 

It has been said that in the drama, characteristic 
truth will compensate every other defect — nay, will do 
what appears a contradiction ; one strong genuine stroke 
of nature will cover a multitude of sins, even against 
nature herself. For when we meet in some scene of a 
good play a very fine stroke of this kind, we are apt to 
become " so intoxicated with it, and so perfectly con- 
vinced of the author's great knowledge of the human 
heart," that we are unwilling to suppose the whole of it 
has not been suggested by the same penetrating spirit. 
Many well-meaning and enthusiastic critics are charged 
by Miss Baillie with having given themselves a great 
deal of trouble in this way, — shutting their eyes most 
ingeniously against the fair light of nature for very love 
of it — converting, in their great zeal, sentiments palpably 
false, in regard both to the character and situation of 
the persons who utter them, sentiments which a child or 
a clown would detect, into the most skilful depictments 
of the heart. The dramatist of the passions can think 



THE FEELIXGS COMMOX TO UNIVERSAL MAX. 347 

of no stronger instance to show how powerfully this 
love of nature dwells within us. 

none ever better distinguished than Shakspeare 
the varieties of human nature, so, Hartley Coleridge 
contends, have few comprehended as he did the mighty 
truth, that, in all its varieties and modifications, that 
nature ntially one and the same — a truth which 

:rted to be the sole law and measure of relative 
morality, the principle of just command and liberty, the 
key to all heart-knowledge, and the ground of all com- 
munion between SOuls. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table breaks off from 

f his discursive " confidences," to ask his fellow- 
guests, are they tired of his "trivial personalities/'' — 
those splashes and streaks of sentiment, sometimes 
perhaps of sentimentality, which they may see when 
them his heart's corolla as if it were a tulip ? 
He begs them not to fancy him an idiot whose conceit 
it is t«> treat himself as an exceptional being : " It is 
because you are just like me that I talk and know that 
you will listen. We are all splashed and streaked with 
sentiments, — not precisely with the same tints, or in ex- 
actly the same patterns, but by the same hand and from 

Line palette." Sir Walter Scott, in his introductory 
' r to Waverley in particular, but also to the 

ilc}- Novels at large, explained his resolve to throw 

the force of his narrative upon the characters and pas- 

actors — those passions common to men in 

all st and which had alike agitated the 

human heart, whether it throbbed under the steel Corslet 
of t: nth Century, the brocaded out of the 

i. or the blue frock and white dimity wai 
of thai le of the nineteenth within which he was 

then writing. So the \ r ,ian novelist Ilenrik 
Scharling in the preface to one of his fictions, 



348 THE HEART OF MAN ONE AND THE SAME 

that the emotions of the mind of man are always and 
everywhere the same ; and native reviewers, while al- 
leging the effort it costs to appreciate a foreign novel, 
allow that so far as the play of human passions is con- 
cerned, one great element of interest is present, what- 
ever may be the author's nationality. The objection, 
however, holds good, in such a case, that although the 
basis of such a book may be in a sense oecumenical, 
the shape which it receives is determined by conditions 
to which the foreign reader is a stranger ; the passion 
or emotion is exhibited through an uncongenial medium 
— the view of life is different, the network of manners 
and associations is different, the standard of humour 
and pathos is different. But just so far as the grand 
elementary feelings of our common nature are con- 
cerned, the foreign author speaks home to the heart ; 
and heart answers to heart, beat for beat and throb 
for throb. 

The original preface to the Last Days of Pompeii 
asserted its author's endeavour at fidelity to the features 
and costume of the age, but also, and " what is far 
more important," at a just representation of the human 
passions and the human heart, " whose elements in all 
ages are the same." In a later preface, he indirectly 
contrasted his work with that of similar writers who, in 
reviving the ancient shadows, sought occasion rather to 
display erudition, than to show how the human heart 
beats the same, whether under the Grecian tunic or the 
Roman toga. What seems to have finally impressed M. 
Guizot the most in his study of Gibbon's great work, is 
the truly philosophical discrimination (jus tesse d' esprit) 
which judges the past as it would judge the present, not 
permitting itself to be blinded by the clouds which time 
gathers around the dead, and which prevent us from 
seeing that under the toga as under the modern dress, 



IN ALL THE WORLD AXD FOR ALL TIME. 349 

in the senate as in our councils, men were what they 
still are. It was long the fashion — and a depraved one 
it was — to treat antiquity as something apart from 
modern experience : men wearing tunics and togas, an 
eminent reviewer observes, were for the most part looked 
upon as belonging to a different race from those who 
wear coats and trousers. Professor Long is commended 
accordingly for his exceptional freedom from this error ; 
writing as he does of Cicero and Crassus, of Pompeius 
and Caesar, as he would write of Bolingbroke and Marl- 
borough, of Brougham and Wellington ; for he saw 
that, however men may differ in their habiliments, their 
manners, or their speech, they differ very little from one 
another in their passions, their motives of action, or 
their prejudices ; and that " even religion makes very 
little essential change in man's nature; that a Supreme 
Pontiff under a different dispensation would have been 
a decorous Primate, and the College of Augurs a re- 
spectable Dean and Chapter." To Vivian Grey's think- 
. although we may have steam kitchens, human 
nature is much the same at the moment he is pacing 
Pall-Mall East, as it was some thousand years 
qually wine men were walking on the banks 
of the IHSSUS. Across the moonlit waters we hear the 
call. f Cythna telling the scared mariners, — 

ill arc human— yon broad ni light 

llions who the s< If-same lik 1 

ali this very 1 
;r thoughts flow on like ours, in Badness or delight. 11 

Q she tells them, 

" From your 1 

1 an echo ; through my inmost frame 
test sound, 

and la' : "Di guise it not wo have one human 

heart All mortal thought common hoc 



350 RECOGNITION OF OUR COMMON NATURE. 

And soon, on shore as at sea, her human words found 
sympathy in human hearts, and these as friend with 
friend made common cause with her. In his preface to 
the poem here cited, Shelley claimed to have chosen a 
story of human passion in its most universal character, 
and appealing to the common sympathies of every 
human breast. It is this recognition of our common 
nature, which gives, as Dr. Brown says, the chief interest 
to scenes that have been occupied with the passions of 
beings like ourselves. The gods of universal mythology 
have perished, bi.t the mortals who bent the knee before 
them still survive in , the immortality of our common 
nature — in that "universal interest which gives to us a 
sort of intellectual existence in scenes and times the 
most remote, and makes the thoughts and emotions of 
others as it were a part of our own being " — uniting the 
past, the present, and the future, and blending man with 
man wherever he is to be found. Bernier has been 
described as one " qui courait le monde et revenait 
sachant combien sous les costumes divers l'homme est 
partout le meme." Threadbare is the truism propounded 
by Alison, that human affairs are everywhere governed 
at bottom by the same principles — the varieties of 
colour, language, and civilization being but the different 
hues of passions and interests which are for ever identical 
among mankind. Would you know the sentiments, 
inclinations, and course of life of the Greeks and 
Romans ? Study well, says David Hume, the temper 
and actions of the French and English. He denies 
that the earth, water, and other elements, examined by 
Aristotle and Hippocrates, are more like to those which 
at present lie under our observation, than the men 
described by Polybius and Tacitus are to those who 
now govern the world. If human nature were not, 
always and everywhere, in the most important points, 



WORDSWORTH OX THE UNIVERSAL HEART 351 

substantially the same, says Archbishop Whately, 
history could furnish no instruction ; but then again, if 
men's manners and conduct, circumstantially and ex- 
ternally, were not infinitely varied in various times and 

ms, hardly any one could fail to profit by that in- 
struction. As it is, therefore, not a little diligence is 
called for in " recognizing, as it were, the same plant in 
different of its growth, and in all the varieties 

Iting from climate and culture, soil and season." 
Shallow readers are never wanting to shallow writers, 
who, as Wordsworth has it, 

" while they most ambitiously set forth 

rinsic differences, the outward marks 
Whereby society has parted man 
From man, neglect the universal heart." 

rdsworth, by the way, catches eagerly at Aristotle's 
assertion that Poetry is the most philosophic of all 
writing : it is so, he maintains — its object being truth, 
not individual and local, but general and operative ; not 
standing upon external testimony, but carried alive 
the heart by passion ; truth which is its own testi- 
fy, which gives competence and confidence to the 
tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the 
same tribunal. "Poetry is the image of man and 
And the poet writes under one restriction 
only, namely, the necessity of giving immediate plea- 
sure to a human being possessed of that information 
which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, 
a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural 
philosopher, but as a Man. Emphatically would 
W< h say of the Poet what Shakspeare said of 

man, that " he looks before and after." lie is the rock 
of defence for human nature ; an upholder and preserver, 

..here with him relationship and love. 

"I f difference of soil and climate, of 1 - 



352 THE UNIVERSAL HEART OF MAN. 

and manners, of laws and customs, — in spite of things 
silently gone out of mind, and things violently de- 
stroyed, — the Poet binds together by passion and know- 
ledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread 
over the whole earth and over all time." Poetry, in 
short, is defined by its votary the first and last of all 
knowledge — a thing immortal as the heart of man. 

" A harper that harps through mountain and glen, 
Wandering, wandering the wide world over, 
Sweetest of singers, yet saddest of men, 
His soul's lost Lady' in vain to discover . . . 
. . . Who has not loved ? and who has not lost ? 
Wherever he wander, the wide world over, 
Singing by city, and castle, and plain, 
Abiding never, for ever a rover, 
Each man that shall hear him will swear almost 
In the minstrel's song that he can discover 
The selfsame lady by whom it was crost, 
For love is love the wide world over." - 

In the tale of human passion, in past ages, argues a 
master of the art, there is something of interest even in 
the remoteness of the time : we love to feel within us 
the bond which unites the most distant eras. " Men, 
nations, customs, perish ; the affections are immortal ; " 
and in them are found the sympathies which unite the 
ceaseless generations. If the past lives again, when we 
look upon its emotions, that is because it lives in our 
own. 

" Strip from fashion the garment she wears ; what remains 

But the old human heart, with its joys and its pains ? 

The same drama that drew to its hopes and its fears 

From the eyes of our fathers both laughter * and tears. 

'Twas conceived in the heart of the first man on earth, . . . 

It was acted in Egypt when Pharaoh was king ; 

* Real mirth, says Johnson, must be always natural, and nature 
is uniform. Men have been wise in very different modes ,* but they 
have always laughed the same way. — Life of Cowley. 



INEXPUGNABLE FOOLISHNESS. 353 

It was spoken in Attic, and sung to the string 

Of the cithern in Greece ; and in Rome, word for word, 

It was uttered by Horace in accents long heard . . . 

Other men, other manners ! anon from the North, 

With the Hun and the Vandal, unchanged it rolled forth. 

New in language alone, it was hymned to the harp 

Harold bore by the Baltic ; its music fell sharp 

With the sword of the Guiscuard ; it made Rudel's weeping 

Melodious for Melisanth ; still is it keeping 

In play the perpetual pulses of passion 

In the heart of mankind ; and whatever the fashion 

Of the garments we wear, 'tis the same life they cover . . . 

Men discern 

The man through the mask ; the heart moved by the heart 

Owns the pathos of life in the pathos of art. 

And the heart is the sole grand republic, in which 

All that's human is equal, the poor and the rich : 

The sole indestructible state, time can touch 

With no change : before Rome, before Carthage, 'twas such 

As it will be when London and Paris are gone." 



XXXII. 

INEXPUGNABLE FOOLISHNESS. 

Proverbs xxvii. 22.* 

BRAYED in a mortar with a pestle, the foolishness 
of the fool .sticks to him still. It is a part of him- 
self, and he would cease to be himself were he once rid 
Of it. 

One of Shenstone's apophthegms runs, " There is none 
can buhl >f sense, but fools, on whom they can 

no impression." Crabbe pictures Coined)- aiming 
fruitlessly .it foolishness impersonated — 

* In the Second Series of Secular Annotation pture Texts t 

pp. 115 121, found half a dozen pages of previous illustra- 

tions of this text, under the heading, M Brayed in a Mortar.'' 

A A 



354 IMPENETRABLE DULNESS. 

" Who shoots at Folly, but her arrow fails : 
Folly, by Dulness armed, eludes the wound, 
And harmless sees the feathered shafts rebound ; 
Unhurt she stands, applauds the archer's skill, 
Laughs at her malice, and is Folly still." 

La Bruyere's words are applicable, every one of them, 
to the impenetrable, imperturbable, indomitable fool: 
" l'on cherche en vain a le corriger par des traits de 
satire qui le designent aux autres, et ou il ne se reconnait 
pas lui-meme : ce sont des injures dites a un sourd." 
While hailing as inimitable the saying of Schiller's, that 
" Heaven and earth fight in vain against a dunce/' or 
against stupidity, Archbishop Trench quotes, as moving 
in the same line with, though far inferior to it, the Chinese 
proverb : " One has never so much need of his wit, as 
when he has to do with a fool." Erasmus pointedly, 
almost pathetically, asks, Quid autem facias istis qui 
. . . stupidiores sint quam ut satisf actionem intelligant? 
There is a quality in certain people which Mr. Thackeray 
takes to be above all advice, exposure, or correction : 
" Only let a man or woman have ' dulness ' sufficient, and 
they need bow to no extant authority." For a dullard 
recognizes no better ; a dullard can't see that he is in 
the wrong ; a dullard has no scruples of conscience, no 
doubts of pleasing, or succeeding, or doing right, no 
qualms for other people's feelings, no respect but for the 
fool himself. " How can you make a fool perceive that 
he is a fool ? Such a person can no more see his own 
folly than he can see his own ears/' Perhaps they 
ought to be long enough, however, for him to see them. 

The great quality ascribed to stupidity, is that of be- 
ing unalterably contented with itself. Like the French 
philosopher's /atf, or fribble, "il est la precisement celui 
dont la multitude rit, et qui seul est grave et ne rit 
point/' " II regarde le monde sans pudeur ; il n'a pas, 






IMPERTURBABLE STUPIDITY. 355 

. de quoi rougir." There is what a Scottish divine 
calls a "beautiful equanimity" about the thorough 
dunce : he is so completely stupid, that he never for an 
instant suspects that he is stupid at all. The clever man 
is apt to have misgivings about the extent of his powers, 
but " your entire booby knows no such fear." Bottom 
the weaver goes through his part in the play with un- 
ruffled composure and confidence. Neither the wit of 
the courtiers nor the presence of the Duke, as Dr. 

in remarks, has any effect upon his nerves. He 
replies to the jest of Demetrius (which he does not 
understand) with the "self-command of ignorant in- 
difference." It is true that Oberon designates him as a 
" hateful fool ; " that Puck stigmatizes him as the greatest 
blockhead of the set ; and that the audience vote him to 
be an ass ; " but what matter is that ? M Let the galled 
jade wince ; his withers are unwrung. Let the thin- 
skinned writhe and wriggle ; he is rhinoceros-hided, and 
no satirist knows where to have him. What feeling 
mind, exclaims Peter Pindar, would be a bull at stake ? 

iched by this mongrel, by that mastiff torn; 
Who'd make a feast to treat the public scorn ? 
Who'd be a bear that grasps his club with pride, 
With which his dancing-m;ister drubs his hide ?" 

None, submits Peter, but the arrantcst fool turns butt to 

catch the :" ridicule ; and when the object of his 

With m -re contempt the grinning world 

! laugh at those who laugh at me," the 

then " in ty I never thriv. . 1 ttiUSt be 

the men n alive." And again in Dr. Wolcot'$ 

Ivanus Urban the reflection occurs, — 

I ! he thinks he all thin 
QteOlpt he looks on others down , 



356 SELF-COMPLACENT STOLIDITY. 

Thrice envied being, whom no tongue can wound, 
In pride's impenetrable armour bound !" 

That wonderful self-complacency with which the fools 
of this earth are endowed, points the moral of one of 
Fitzboodle's tales. And wonderful indeed is what 
Moliere's Clitandre admires in his Trissotin, 

" Cette intrepidity de bonne opinion, 
Cet indolent dtat de confiance extreme 
Qui le rend en tout temps si content de soi-meme." 

Mr. Wyndham's defence of bull-baiting, partly on the 
ground that it was a real pleasure to the animal chiefly 
concerned, affording him in fact an agreeable excitement, 
has been generally discredited in the case of the bull ; 
but there are some human beings to whom it has been 
thought difficult not to apply it, — this being the only 
amusement that can be got out of them ; and great is 
the self-command required in one who has to do with a 
thoroughly stolid and withal self-complacent companion, 
not to try what " sticking moral pins into him " will 
effect by way of diversion. Lord Macaulay got hold of 
a paradox'after his own heart when he argued of Boswell, 
that if he had not been a great fool, he would never 
have been a great writer ; since he never could have 
produced so excellent a book had it not been for the 
qualities which made him the butt of his associates, — 
among which qualities, " insensibility to all reproof" 
stands nearly foremost, — "a cool self-complacency/ a 
perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of 
himself." " Having himself no sensibility to derision and 
contempt, he took it for granted that all others were 
equally callous." And yet in a variety of essential 
particulars Boswell was certainly no fool. Nor were the 
conquests he made in life of a kind to draw upon him 
such, terms of concession as Talbot expresses in Schiller's 
Jungfrau — ■ 



NO FOOL LIKE AN OLD FOOL. 



" Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield ! 
Against stupidity the very gods 
Themselves contend in vain." 

Especially is this contention in vain against stupidity 
when well stricken in years. Not to all men do years 
bring the philosophic mind. Not to all do they bring 
that which should accompany old age, in the way of 
wisdom and reflective power. To the Venerable Bede 
is ascribed the popular saying, that there is no fool like 
an old fool ; and everyday experience proves that there 
is no matter-of-fact incompatibility between irrationality 
and old age, and that to many a modern senior might 
the warning in Sophocles apply, Mr) '(fievpedys avov? re 
kcli yepcov a/ia. The subject of Canning's satire appears 
to have been far from deserving so sharp an expression 
of it as in the stanzas parodying Moore's familiar lines, 

" Believe me, if all those ridiculous airs 
Which you practise so pretty to-day 
Should vanish by age, and your well-twisted hairs, 
Like my own, be both scanty and grey : 

u Thou would'st still be a goose, as a goose thou hast been, 
Though a fop and a fribble no more, 
And the world that has laughed at the fool of eighteen, 
lid laugh at the fool of threescore. 
• # * # • 

" Oh, the fool that is truly so, never forgets, 
But as truly fools on to the close," etc. 

Novelists of some note are taxed with ignoring the 
fact that some of us have the capacity to learn — for 

low we may be to receive benefit from stripes, 

and dull scholars as experience may find us, still we 

. it is hoped, toget a few U isona by 

, and to avoid this year the patent mistakes we had 

made and d for la t year. But the writer, ill 

; to think differently of mankind ; and in 

their of illustration men and women are but a 



358 NO FOOL LIKE AN OLD FOOL. 

shade removed from moral idiocy, and prove themselves 
incapable of learning, however strenuously they may be 
taught, and however bitterly they may suffer for previous 
failures, — all of them pursuing for a second, third, and 
fourth time exactly the same path as that by which they 
have come to grief before. Self-conceit often strengthens 
as one grows older ; and moralists depict for us an 
" obstinate old fool " around whom self-love has thrown 
a magic veil, which blinds him to the sneers of others 
and the strong contempt so openly exhibited ; for " self- 
love has always something comfortable to retire upon." 
It seems to be a fancy with some folks that a man grows 
wise by growing old, without taking any particular 
pains about it. But " the older the crab-tree the more 
crabs it bears," says the proverb. Taking note — half 
amused, half distressed — of the follies to which men are 
seen to commit themselves when going down the hill of 
life, a great French peiisee-writer is moved to exclaim, 
" C'est la jeunesse encore qui, malgre ses fougues et ses 
promptitudes, est serieuse et sensee ; c'est la seconde 
partie de la vie qui se fait egaree ou legere." 

Hawthorn descries a kind of ludicrous unfitness in the 
idea of a venerable rose-bush ; and applies the remark 
by analogy to human life — persons who can only be 
graceful and ornamental, who can give the world nothing 
but flowers, should die young, he contends, and never be 
seen with grey hairs and wrinkles. How much more 
persons who can only be foolish and frivolous ! One 
recalls the late Mr. Charles Buxton's humorous depreca- 
tion of old people as such, and his wish to have them 
decently disposed of off-hand — say, to have them shot by 
the bishop of the diocese. Not always le temps remedie 
anx torts de la jeunesse, as one of Gresset's elderly people 
says of a junior, about whose future another veteran is 
less hopeful : 



PASSING FAIR. 359 



" Xon ; il peut rester fat : n'en voit-on pas sans cesse 
Qui jusqu'a cinquante ans gardent l'air evente, 
Et sont les veterans de la fatuiu 

Do you suppose fools' caps do not cover grey hair, as 
well as jet or auburn ? a later satirist inquires. This he 
knows, that there are late crops of wild oats, as well as 
early harvests of them ; and from observation he is con- 
vinced that the avcna fatua grows up to the very las* 
i <f the year. 

" What weakness see not children in their sires ! 
Grand-climacterical absurdities I" 

exclaims Dr. Young ; adding that 

" It makes folly thrice a fool ; 
And our first childhood might our last despise." 



XXXIII. 
PASSING FAIR. 

Pk \xxi. 30. 

Till", words of King Lemuel, after the teaching that 
his mother taught him, are never more emphatic, 
never m«>re fervid and impressive, than when asserting 
the excellence of tile virtuous woman, and her priceless 
—priceless, for it is far above rubies. Having 
d with vigorous enthusiasm on her simply 
invaluable qualities, lie finishes with the maxim, saw, or 
air tS deceitful, and beauty is vain ; but 
aiaii that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised." 

•. but beauty's frail/ 1 is one of Carew's 

, metrically and musically applied and enforced : 
n summer's rain or winter's Min ; 

Most fleecing when it is roost dear ; 
while but we say— 'tis here. 



360 EVANESCENCE OF BEAUTY. 

Those curious locks, so aptly twined, 
Whose every hair a soul doth bind, 
Will change their auburn hue, and grow 
White and cold as winter's snow. 
That eye, which now is Cupid's nest, 
Will prove his grave, and all the rest 
Will follow ; in the cheek, chin, nose, 
Nor lily shall be found, nor rose." 

His contemporary, Sir Henry Wotton, in his lines of 
farewell to the vanities of the world, calls " Beauty, th' 
eye's idol, but a damask'd skin." Beauty impersonate, 
in Calderon's Great Theatre of the World, is taunted for 
that she remembers not the saying of Ezekiel, when he 
showed how through pride was perfect beauty resolved 
to foul corruption ; nor bethinks her that all the beauty 
of the world is a flower of hastiest doom ; that there is 
neither white nor ruddy rose, which has unrolled the 
rich beauty of its leaflets to the flattering day and the 
wooing sun, but must wither — que no caduque. 

" Here nature cannot her sharp grief repress, 
Seeing how short is beauty's earthly doom, 
Still growing worse than what it was and less." 

For women, says Duke Orsino, are as roses, whose fair 
flower, being once displayed, doth fall that very hour. 
Another of Shakspeare's dukes, and a more philosophi- 
cal, less sentimental one, tells Isabella that the hand 
that hath made her fair, hath made her good : " The 
goodness, that is cheap in beauty, makes beauty brief in 
goodness ; but grace, being the soul of your complexion, 
should keep the body of it ever fair." The strain of the 
Passionate Pilgrim is plaintive as beseems him : 

" Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good, 

A shining gloss, that fadeth suddenly ; 

A flower that dies, when first it 'gins to bud ; 

A brittle glass, that's broken presently : 
A doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower, 
Lost, vaded, broken, dead within an hour. 



LYRICS BY CAREIV AXD WALLER. 361 

"And as goods lost are seld or never found, 
As faded gloss no rubbing will refresh, 
As flowers dead lie withered on the ground, 
As broken glass no cement can redress, 
So beauty, blemished once, for ever's lost, 
In spite of physic, painting, pain, and cost." 

Carew, accounted the prince of amatory versifiers of 
his day, and said by Wood to be almost " adored " by 
his fellow-poets in general, and by Jonson in particular, 
has already been quoted in these pages, on the theme of 
beaut nescence. He will bear quoting again, in 

another metre, and not from a merely negative point of 
1 for here he affirms what is better than beauty, as 
well as insists on the perishable tenure of that gift : 

" He that loves a rosy cheek, 
Or a coral lip admires, 
Or from starlike eyes doth seek 
Fuel to maintain his fires, — 
As old Time makes those decay, 
So his flames must waste away. 

" But a smooth and steadfast mind, 
Gentle thoughts and calm desires, 
Hearts with equal love combined, 

Kindle never-dying fires. 
Where these are not, I despise 
. ely cheeks or lips or eyes." 

The wind-up of Waller's mission of "lovely rose M to 
mistress is : 

" Then die ! that she 
The common fate of all things rare 

May read in thee ; 
HOW small a part of time they share 

10 WOndrOUS sweet anil fair !" 

Rousseau, "passe avec Lea armies. 

n't Seul est la veritable reSSOUTCe du sc\c." Tope 

would have Miss Blount trust nut too much her now 



362 PERISHABLE PHYSICAL BEAUTY. 



" Those, age or sickness soon or late disarms : 
Good humour only teaches charms to last, 
Still makes new conquests, and maintains the past. 
Love raised on beauty will like that decay." 

The text is enforced anew in the Rape of the Lock : 

" But since, alas ! frail beauty must decay, 
Curled or uncurled since locks will turn to grey, 

* * # # 

What then remains, but well our power to use, 
And keep good-humour still, whatever we lose ?" 

The exception to be taken to beauty as a marriage 
portion (if it be beauty of the highest order), is not, says 
Sir Henry Taylor, that it can become otherwise than 
precious while it lasts, but rather that, as it is precious 
so is it perishable, and that, let it be valued as it may, 
it must be accounted at the best but a melancholy 
possession : — 

" For human beauty is a sight 

To sadden rather than delight ; 

Being the prelude of a lay 

Whose burthen is decay." 

Mr. Forester, in Melincourt, avows that as to what is 
called beauty, mere symmetry of form and features, it 
would be an object with him in purchasing a statue, but 
none whatever in choosing a wife. Let her countenance 
be the mirror of good qualities, such as truthful sim- 
plicity, tender feeling, kindly goodwill, and she cannot 
be otherwise than beautiful. He thinks with the Athen- 
ians that beauty and goodness are inseparable — kcCKo^ 
KayaObs. Giving to an imaginary painter an imaginary 
commission to paint the wedded companion of his West- 
moreland home, De Quincey retracts the injunction to 
do justice to her physical loveliness : " Paint her arms 
like Aurora's, and her smiles like Hebe's ; — but no, 

dear M ! not even in jest let me insinuate that thy 

power to illuminate my cottage rests upon a tenure so 
perishable as mere personal beauty." It is in Mrs. 



ABIDIXG CHARM OF EXPRESSIOX. 363 

Wordsworth, as he first saw her, that the same writer 
gratefully recognized a remarkable proof how possible 
it is for a woman " neither handsome nor even comely, 
according to the rigour of criticism — nay, generally pro- 
nounced very plain," to exercise all the practical fasci- 
nation of beauty, through the mere compensator}* charms 
of sweetness all but angelical, of simplicity the most 
entire, womanly self-respect and purity of heart speaking 
through all her looks, acts, and movements. Currer 
's Professor professes in print to be no Oriental; 
white necks, carmine lips and cheeks, clusters of bright 
curls, do not suffice for him without that Promethean 
spark which will live after the roses and lilies are faded, 
the burnished hair grown grey. In another of her books 
:ite compares Ginevra and Paulina, each a 
beauty in her way, — the former having the advantage in 
material charms, the latter in attractions more subtle 
and spiritual — in light and eloquence of eye, grace of 
mien, and winning variety of expression. Of one of the 
ind winsome of French "beauties" we 
I by a contemporary and competent 
critic, that she "n'eut jamais beaucoup de beaute, elle 
• -ut de L'agr6ment' J And by another, that " il 
faut pourtant avouer que son esprit est plus charmant 

thou not/ J says I [ero to 
Sir Valentine, in Woman's V. 

hat beauty will take cold will have the toothache — 
\ catch a fever— that its peachy check 
Will canker in that its >.. 

tee of smil 

uncouth contortions — 
in, 

It is a tiling in vai 

that but meets the 



3^4 EVANESCENT BEAUTY. 

Hero. I mean the beauty thou alone canst see, 
And provest thou only see'st." 

But who, says Richardson's Clarissa, would grudge a 
pretty fool her short day ? since with her summer's sun 
when her butterfly flutters are over, and the winter of 
age and furrows arrives, she " will feel the just effects of 
having neglected to cultivate her better faculties ; for 
then, like another Helen, she will be unable to bear the 
reflection even of her own glass ; and being sunk into 
the insignificance of a mere old woman, she will be 
entitled to the contempts which follow that character ; " 
whereas the " discreet matron," who, as Miss Harlowe 
advisedly words it, " carries up into advanced life " the 
ever-amiable character of virtuous prudence and useful 
experience, finds solid veneration take place of airy 
admiration, and more than supply the want of it. One 
of the Letters to Julia is admonitory in witty earnest : 

" What though as yet no spot begin 
To stain the brightness of the skin, 
Where York and Lancaster combine 
Their roses in those cheeks of thine ? 
Deem not the well-meant hint officious, 
That we he-creatures are capricious, 
That when your charms have ceased to blind us, 
Nor prayers can move, nor oaths can bind us. 
Soon Autumn on those charms encroaches, 
Soon winter's icy hand approaches. 
Then from dimmed eyes unheeded flow 
The bitter tears of fruitless woe ; 
The faded bosom Man forsakes, 
Though the poor heart beneath it breaks." 

John Jerningham's remonstrance, is it not written in 
his wife's Journal? 

" ' Time is so pitiless,' he said ; 

' Shall time be pitiless in vain ? 
When youth is fled, and beauty dead, 

What will remain ? — what will remain ? ' " 



THE TRUE SPORT OF TIME. 365 

The time comes when Alton Locke has to ask himself 
what it was he lately adored, — a soul, or a face ? the 
inward reality, or the outward symbol, which is only 
valuable as a sacrament of the loveliness within ? What 
was that beauty but a hollow mask ? Bitterly he com- 
pares it with the aspect of one now sitting by him, "wan 
and faded, beautiful no more as men call beauty, but 
with the spirit of an archangel gazing from those clear 
fiery eyes" Que regrettez-vous? asks Michelet of such 
a one : " La beaute de teint, de traits, que vous eutes 
par hazard de naissance, ... la faveur accidentelle 
de l'age ou nous passons tous ? Mais la rare et person- 
nels beaute que vous avez prise, e'est vous-meme, votre 
ame visible, telle que vous la fites par une vie pure, une 
noble et constante harmonic." Some one has said that 
as well might you look for good fruit and blossom on a 
rootless and sapless tree, as for charms that will endure 
in a feeble and relaxed nature : for a little while, the 
blooming semblance of beauty may flourish round 
; but it cannot bear a blast ; it soon fades, 
even in serenest sunshine. A modern philosopher hails 
• in ugliness, that it mends with years ; in- 
asmuch as it has nothing to spoil, it takes courage. As 
Charlotte Lindsay, witty and plain, put it, "My 
ugliness has Lost its bloom." Beaut)- is the true sport of 

time; it is composed of evanescent qualities; indeed it 

is alleged to be its charm that it passes : we must make 

of the show, for it stays among us but a day. 

IS the theme of the Essay-writer who testifies that 

the n: a and tell-tale faces he can call to mind, 

the question Or the exclamation, lluv, 

old! are the f once handsome women. "It is 

beauties that make wrecks — an epithet never applicable 

to the harsh or commonplace.'" Nevertheless there may 

fallacy in the saw, so trite that it for a truism, 



366 SKIN-DEEP BEAUTY: A VEXED QUESTION. 

about beauty being only skin deep. " And all the 
carnal beauty of my wife is but skin deep," quoth Sir 
Thomas Overbury in A Wife ; and one of Moliere's 
learned ladies reflects that 

" La beaute du visage est un frele ornament, 
Une fleur passagere, un eclat d'un moment, 
Et qui n'est attach^ qu'a la simple dpiderme." 

Whereas Mr. Herbert Spencer is rife with physiological 
reasons, founded on the framework of the face and its 
osseous structure, to prove that the saying that beauty is 
but skin deep is but a skin-deep saying. He believes and 
maintains that beauty of character is related to beauty 
of face ; and while admitting that plainness may co-exist 
with nobility of nature, and fine features with baseness, 
he yet holds that mental and facial perfection are funda- 
mentally connected. And there are stalwart and stren- 
uous supporters, of either sex and every kind, of the 
doctrine that beauty is a real boon, a gift direct from 
the Giver of every good and perfect gift, with Whom, 
unlike this gift, there is no variableness, neither shadow 
of turning. 

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu exposes in one of her 
letters the mistake, as she deems it, " usual in mothers," 
of being at great pains to persuade any one of their 
daughters who may be a beauty, that she is ugly, or 
at least that they think so, " which the young woman 
never fails to believe springs from envy, and is perhaps 
not much in the wrong." My lady would, if possible, 
give the young beauty a just notion of her figure, and 
show her how far it is valuable. " Every advantage has 
its price, and may be over or under valued. It is the 
common doctrine of (what are called) good books, to in- 
spire a contempt of beauty, riches, etc., which has done 
as much mischief among the young of our sex as an 
over eager desire of them." Why they should not look 



BEAUTY: A GIFT OF GOD. 367 

on those things as blessings where they are bestowed, 
though not necessaries that it is impossible to be happy 
without, Lady Man- cannot conceive. The Marquis de 
la Fare insisted that " il ne faut pas mepriser les dons de 
la nature, pour petits qu lis soient, quand on les a dans 
leur perfection ;" and he might have cited Homer to his 
purpose, where Paris replies to Hector's reproaches about 
his beauty, that the splendid gifts of the gods are never 
to be rejected or despised. We are naturally disposed, 
as one of the Bronte sisters argued, to love what gives us 
pleasure, and what more pleasing than a beautiful face — 
when we know no harm of the possessor at least ? If a 
woman is fair and amiable, she is praised for both quali- 
ecially the former, by the bulk of mankind ; 
if on the other hand she is disagreeable in person and 
character, " her plainness is commonly inveighed against 
as her greatest crime, because, to common observers, it 
gives the greatest offence." They that have beauty, let 
them be thankful for it, says Agnes Grey, and make a 
good use of it, like any other talent ; and let those who 
have it not, console themselves, and do the best they can 
without it; "certainly, though liable to be over-esti- 
mated, it is a gift of God, and not to be despised." Mr. 
Thackeray had his word of satire for the " good-natured 
female friends n who are given to ask what is there in 
a pair of pink cheeks and blue eyes forsooth? and to 
ilt other gifts and graces, or acquirements and accom- 
plishments, which are so "far more valuable for a fe- 
male," than those fugitive charms which a few years will 
inevitably tarn: lite edifying he deemed it, to hear 

culate upon the worthlessness and the evan- 

: beauty. Some women take such speculations 

from some men. When Mdlle. de Sevigne's 

ter in philosophy, the Abbe de la M I ok 

minding thai beauty that her 



368 FADING FLOWER PLATITUDES. 

charms, like all things else, were subject to decay, " Yes," 
she replied, " but they are not decayed yet." She was 
right, Mr. Hay ward holds, and so was the English girl 
who, on being reminded by her spiritual guide that 
beauty was only skin deep, remarked that this was deep 
enough till people began going into society without their 
skins. " You seem to have quite a conceit of your 
beauty," Aunt Nesbit tells Nina Gordon ; and that 
demoiselle accepts the impeachment with engaging can- 
dour : " Well, I know I am pretty. I'm not going to 
pretend I don't. I like my own looks, now, that's a fact. 
I'm not like one of your Greek statues, I know. I'm 
not wonderfully handsome, nor likely to set the world 
on fire with my beauty. I'm just a pretty little thing," 
and that suffices. Miss Rhoda Broughton impatiently 
dismisses to the limbo of dull platitudes and insipid 
common-places the text that " beauty is a fading flower." 
Of course it is true, she admits — tiresomely, provokingly, 
heart-breakingly true ; so true as to be almost a self- 
evident proposition. " Ay me, indeed ! What so frail, 
so butterfly-lived, as beauty in the individual ? Hardly 
are we consoled by the reflection that at least in the 
species it seems perennial." But then she goes on to 
say, that although the visible presence of this fairest of 
earth's visitants — " this living witness that Eden once 
existed " — is so sadly short, yet in memory it outlives 
all the other powers that sway our destinies ; and 
Dreams of Fair Women, thousands of years dead and 
gone, still inspire laureates and enchant their readers. 

Truisms both, — the spell of beauty, and the evanes- 
cence of beauty. If Helen and Cleopatra have still their 
poets, so neither will the theme of Burns' verse be ever 
too old for repetition : 

"The lily's hue, the rose's dye, 
The kindling lustre of an eye ; 



1 SOMETHING THAN BEAUTY DEARER: 

Who but owns their magic sway, 
Who but knows they all decay ! 
The tender thrill, the pitying tear. 
'1'hc generous purpose, nobly dear. 
The gentle look, that rage disarms — 
These are all immortal charms." 

Something than beauty dearer, Thomson sings, in 
horn:: . '• mind-illumined face," reflecting truth, 

goodness, honour, gentleness, and love. And in his 
Amanda he tells us 'tis not for common charms he si 
for what the vulgar beauty call ; 'tis not a cheek, a lip, an 
he soul that lights them all. Leigh Hunt 
depreciates the Venus de' Medici, whose (dCc seemed 
to him to vilify and vulgarize all which her person in- 
spires : the question lying, as he puts it, between a 
figure divine and a face altogether unworthy. Venus 
could not be Venus without attractiveness of expression, 
intends : a beautiful figure is not all, nor even half: 
far more requisite to have beaut\ r in the eyes, 
beauty in the smile. Addison's enamoured J uba speaks 
for hi well as for himself, when he professes, 

'" I t of features, or complexion, 

tincture of a skin that I admire, 
lUty soon grows familiar to tl. 

id pulls upon the S 

Marcia towers above her 

True she i^ fair, oh how divinely fair ! 

still the love!\ maid improves her charms 
With Uiwi unaffected wisdom, 

DCtity of main: 

the prince in his raptures and rcflec- 

means well, /<• pauvre homme ! and v 
nd that albeit Cato's soul shines out in i 

her looks are also the habita- 
of winning mildness and attr. liles, that with 

1 ir of her father' 

leal epithet. 

I; i; 



37o THE BEAUTY THAT SO SOON DECAYS, 

One of Crabbers prettiest pictures is that of Lucy, in 
his tale of The Mother : 

" There was such goodness, such pure nature seen 
In Lucy's looks, a manner so serene ; 
Such harmony in motion, speech, and air, 
That without fairness she was more than fair : 
Had more than beauty in each speaking grace 
That lent their cloudless glory to the face, 
Where mild good sense in placid looks were* shown, 
And felt in every bosom but her own." 

We read of Lalla Rookh, in the closing chapter of her 
veracious history, that what she had lost of the bloom 
and radiancy of her charms was more than made up by 
" that intellectual expression, that soul beaming forth 
from the eyes, which is worth all the rest of loveliness.' 5 
Wordsworth describes gladsome spirits, and benignant 
looks, that for a face not beautiful did more than beauty 
for the fairest face can do. Dr. Reid, the metaphysician, 
pronounces good nature to be the best feature, even in 
the finest face. " Modesty, sensibility, and sweetness, 
blended together, so as either to enliven or correct each 
other, give almost as much attraction as the passions are 
capable of adding to a very pretty face/'' Cette femme 
n'etait pas belle ; elle elait bien plus que belle, says Fre- 
deric Soulie of one of his charmers. Charlotte Bronte's 
are the lines, — 

" You ask if she had beauty's grace ? 

I know not — but a nobler face 
My eyes have seldom seen ; 

A keen and fine intelligence, 

And, better still, the truest sense, 
Were in her speaking mien. 

But bloom or lustre was there none." 

With which we may compare Scott's description of a 
young face of the unfair sex : — 

* Sic. Nor is this a singular, at least single, instance of Mr. 
Crabbe's putting plural for singular. 



AXD THE LOVELIXESS THAT LASTS. 371 

" A face more fair you well might find, 
For Redmond's knew the sun and wind, 
Nor boasted, from their tinge when free, 
The charm of regularity ; 
But every feature had the power 
To aid th' expression of the hour," etc. 

Stella thanked Swift, in a birthday epistle, for having 

taught her, young, to "despise the ogling of a coxcomb's 

and to cultivate charms that are more lasting; 

and she drew a sketch of a beauty just decayed, invoking 

art to nature's aid, and failing in the artificial : 

" Such is the fate of female race 
With no endowments but a face ; 
Before the thirtieth year of life, 
A maid forlorn, or hated wife.*' 

The concluding lines of (last century's) Lord Palmer- 
ston's poem on Beauty avow, on the other hand, that in 
vain the stealing hand of Time may pluck the blossoms 
of their prime : " Envy may talk of bloom decayed, how 
lilies droop, and roses fade ; " but constancy has other 
charms for a retainer, and the John Anderson in his old 
age, fond as ever of the bride of his young manhood, sees 
" still with fond endearments blend the wife, the mis- 
and the friend." The Angel in the House is the 
correlative of Faithful for Ever ; and Mr. Coventry 

"Jane is not fair, yet pleases well 
The eye in which no others dwell ; 
And feature-, somewhat plain 
And homely manners leave her yet 

crowning boon and most expr 
Of H inventive tendei 1 

A woman. But I do her u i 

the world's eyes guide my tongue ! 
She has a handsomeness that pays 

And dwells not on the arch'd blow's height 

And lids which softly lodge the li^ht, 



372 'ONLY THE ACTIONS OF THE JUST 

Nor in the pure field of the cheek 
Flowers, though the soul be still to seek ; 
But shows as fits that solemn place 
Whereof the window is the face : 
Blankness and leaden outlines mark 
What time the Church within is dark ; 
Yet view it on a Sunday night, 
Or some occasion else for light, 
And each ungainly line is seen 
Some special character to mean 
Of Saint or Prophet, and the whole 
Blank window is a blazing scroll." 

•3V" "TV" W W 

Cato would not allow any one but the virtuous to be 
handsome. " Handsome who handsome is, who hand- 
some does is more so," as the line runs in the Bothie of 
Tober-na- Vtcolich. " Pretty is all very pretty, it's 
prettier far to be useful.''' 

" No, fair Lady Marian, I say not that ; but I will say, 
Stately is service accepted, but lovelier service rendered, 
Interchange of service the law and condition of Beauty ; 
Anyway beautiful only to be the thing one is meant for. 

w w w "a* •%$ 

Yes she is beautiful, Philip, beautiful even as morning : 
Yes, it is that which I said, the Good and not the Attractive ! 
Happy is he that finds, and finding does not leave it I" 

And when our souls shall leave this dwelling, as Shir- 
ley says in T/ie Traitor ; " the glory of one fair and vir- 
tuous action is above all the scutcheons on our tombs or 
silken banners over us." So Wordsworth's dalesmen 
trust the lingering gleam of their departed lives to oral 
record and the silent heart ; depositories faithful and 
more kind than fondest epitaph ; for, if those fail, what 
boots the sculptured tomb ? 

" The dust is brother to the dust. Seeing which, 
And this alone, the actions of the just 
Are lords for ever, and defy the dust." 

The monition is urgent to seek, and to ensue it, whatso- 



SMELL SWEET AXD BLOSSOM IN THE DUST. 

ever is lovely, in the best sense, the abiding one, — a love- 
liness that will wear well, and escape the tarnish of time. 
Let them who are passing fair, — that is, surpassing, — 
remember that the passing also means passing away. 
The scent of the rose survives by many a long day its 
ephemeral beauty, the grace of the fashion of which 
heth so soon. The "scented bundles" of hay are 
described in a haymaking scene of Miss Broughton's 
.eeter in death than in life, like a good man's 
fame.''' Only the actions of the just smell sweet and 
blossom in the dust. And is there any moral hid within 
the bosom of the rose ? In those familiar old Divine 
Songs for Children we find one, and not far to seek. 
Trite enough it is, but so it deserves to be : matter-of- 
course it may be, matter-of-fact it should ; and if com- 
mon-place, it can scarcely be too common. 

" Then I'll not be proud of my youth or my beauty, 
Since both of them wither and fade, 
But gain a good name by well doing my duty, 
Which may scent like a rose when I'm dead.'' 



V 



XXXIV. 

) XEW THING UNDER THE SC'X. 

Ecc 3 i. 9, 10. 

ANITY of Vanities being the Treacher's pro 

tion, this was one of the corollaries: "The thing 
that hath been, it is that which shall be ; and that which 
is done, is that which shall be done ; and there is no 
new thing under the sun." The note of interrogation 
follows, challenging exception to that rule: Is there 
anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new 5 It 
hath been already of old time, which was before us. 



374 NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN? 

The business of the world is imitation, Dr. South 
says ; and that which we call novelty is nothing but 
repetition. " The figure and motion of the world is cir- 
cular, and experience no less than mathematics will 
evince, that as it turns round, the same part must be 
often in the same place." Marcus Antoninus meditates 
that a little while is enough to view the world in ; for 
things are repeated, and come over again apace : Nature 
treads in a circle, and has much the same face through 
the course of ages. Nor is it only under the sun that 
such uniformity prevails. The circling seasons, in their 
course repeated o'er and o'er, see the same things which 
they have seen before ; 

" The same stars keep their watch, and the same sun 
Runs in the track where he from first hath run ; 
The same moon rules the night ; tides ebb and flow ; 
Man is a puppet, and this world a show ; 
Their old dull follies old dull fools pursue, 
And vice in nothing but in mode is new." 

In the celebrated imaginary conversation with Bishop 
Parker, Andrew Marvell is made to dispute the proverb 
in many applications of it ; as to there being no new 
thoughts, for instance, when it might just as well be 
asserted that there are no new men, because other men 
existed before, with eyes, mouth, nostrils, chin, and many 
other appurtenances. But as there are myriads of forms, 
so are there of thoughts, of the same genus, each taking 
its peculiar conformation. " iEschylus and Racine, struck 
by the same idea, would express a sentiment very dif- 
ferently." Every note in music has been sounded fre- 
quently ; yet a composition of MarvelPs contemporary, 
Purcell, may be brilliant by its novelty. There are ex- 
tremely few roots in a language ; yet the language may 
be varied, and novel too, age after age. " There may 
be, even in these late days, more originality of thought 



VIEWS OF DUTEXS, FOURXIER, ETC. 375 

. . . than we have yet discovered. The admirers of 
Homer never dreamt that a man more pathetic, more 
sublime, more thoughtful, more imaginative, would fol- 
low. Yet Shakspeare came." It is the teaching of 
natural philosophy — see, for instance, the vexed ques- 
tioners of such works as M. Fournier's Le Vieux-Neuf : 
Hist aire Ancienne des Inventions et Di converts Mod ernes, 
or Dutens J older and better-known book, — that ever 
since the earth has been the earth, and the sun the sun, 
there has probably been no new thing, speaking physi- 
cally and materially, in either; the forces and elements 
of our globe, and of all its brother and sister planets — 
nay of the sun himself, for that matter, — being the same 
now as at their first creation : but that with the first 
appearance of man, there was the advent of a new, 
because a spiritual nature ; and that since his entrance, 
nothing material has been added or taken away ; all 
nature' inces and potentialities remaining un- 

changed ; but man's wants and desires being continually 
growing and expanding, he has ever been impelled to 
discover and invent, that is, to "lay bare" and "find 
out," more and more of the virtues and uses of what- 
soever lay around him. Men are alleged still to exist 
who believe in the exhaustive wisdom of the extinct 
lore of the Egyptians, and who imagine that if that 
bibliothecal bugbear, the Alexandrian library, had been 

rved, we should have found the strictest parallelism 
between ancient and modern literature, science, and art. 

■ are .^till to be found who believe, or say they 
believe, that in the darkness of that remoter than Cim- 
merian time, "not only pins and needles, printing and 
gunpowder, but also gigantic bridges and tunnels, crystal 

palaces and railways, locomotives and marine en 

and most certainly electric or phs, were 

•union as with us now." Some words with a 



376 NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN t 

Mummy, by Edgar Allan Poe, are a popular satire on 
this extreme view ; while, on the other hand, grave in- 
quirers like Sir Henry Holland own it impossible not to 
be struck with the fact, that modern research is carrying 
us back to the realization of many ancient opinions, 
which have hitherto been regarded only as vague hypo- 
theses, without other sanction than the hardiness or 
ingenuity of thought which first suggested them. " All 
indeed who read, as well as write, on medical topics, 
will find how difficult it is to attain any opinion or truth 
that has wholly escaped the genius or labours of those 
who have gone before," — this being especially true on 
every point of theory and general doctrine. No man, 
says Emerson, can read the history of astronomy with- 
out perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not 
new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, 
Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empedocles, Aristarchus, 
Pythagoras, had anticipated them ; " each had the same 
tense geometrical brain, apt for the same vigorous com- 
putation and logic, a mind parallel to the movement of 
the world." But admitting that the germs of the ideas 
which have led in later times to the perfection of giant 
helps to modern civilization were extant in ancient days, 
between the germ and the ripe fruit there is a distinction 
not without a difference. As Mr. Lewes points out, 
many of those coincidences upon which historical 
theories are based, turn out, on close inspection, to be 
merely verbal, or at best approximative. The frequent 
coincidence in expression of the physical speculations of 
the Greeks with those of modern science, — does this, 
he asks, prove that the moderns borrowed their science 
from the ancients ? " M. Dutens thought so, and has 
written an erudite but singularly erroneous book to 
prove it." Democritus, we are reminded, asserted the 
Milky Way to be only a cluster of stars ; but the asser- 



HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF ? 

tion was a mere guess, wholly without proof, and gained 
no acceptance : it was Galileo who " discovered " what 
Democritus "guessed." Thus also Empedocles, Pytha- 
goras, and Plato are said to have been perfectly ac- 
quainted with the doctrine of gravitation ; and "this 
absurdity is made delusive by dint of forced transla- 
tions, which elicit something like coincidence of expres- 
sion, although every competent person detects the want 
of coincidence in the ideas."* The phrase of Terence 
is to be taken with a good pinch of salt : Nullum est 
nunc dictum, quod sit turn dictum prius. 

That History repeats itself, is another applicable phase 
of the proverb, Nothing new under the sun. Plutarch 
had a weakness for parallels, historical and biographical; 
and severer scribes have upheld the theory of cycles in 
history. In the panorama of the physical and moral 
world the sacred philosopher is understood to have seen 
stability and uniformity in the midst of apparent change, 
and to have deduced one law for the past, the present, 
and the future. " The thing which hath been is that 
which shall be, and that which is done is that which 
shall be done." The same line of thought is i 
ni/ed as apparent in the Greek theory of the poli- 
tical cycle : monarch)' splits into oligarch)' ; the many 
revolt against the misrule of the few ; democracy in 
turn is rescued from anarchy by a single head, and so 
round again. In what are called 

nary communiti far as the)- are really 

.there is, modern philosophy agrees, nothing 

mder the sun, and it may be reasonably believed 

il : " Em] Kti.v 

i mathematicis rationibus 
Newtona" — Pfo 



3/3 DOES HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF? 

that the thing which is done is that which shall be done. 
" In most ancient nations, through the most violent 
political vicissitudes, much remained standing and 
stable, and it was what most concerned the life of man. 
His customs, his traditions, his beliefs, his manner of 
life, remained for the most part unaffected, though 
dynasties were changed and empires were shattered 
above his head." And it is argued, that had statistics 
formed a part of ancient philosophy, the regularity or 
periodicity of social phenomena would have been found 
much more striking than now : an ancient statistician 
might have foretold with general accuracy the number 
of caravans that would cross the desert for a hundred 
years and the number and sorts of crimes that would 
be committed by several successive generations in a 
stationary condition of morals and circumstances. But 
now the very facts which constitute what is called the 
progress of society are seen to add greatly to the diffi- 
culty of constructing anything like an adequate theory 
of society and its future. " With the failure of periodi- 
city in the phenomena [of society], the element of the 
incalculable in human affairs increases." No historical 
parallel, it has been said, can be absolutely perfect, 
because no event in history ever exactly repeats itself : 
the fact that a parallel is a parallel, the fact that two 
events of different ages or different countries are com- 
pared together, will hinder the two events from being 
exactly alike. But however remote in time and place the 
two events may be, analogous causes may have been at 
work in the two cases, bringing about analogous effects, 
and practical instruction may be drawn from the com- 
parison. A philosophic dissertator on historical cycles 
concludes that, upon the whole, history does repeat 
itself a good deal in the various ups and downs of the 
same nation ; but in studying such cycles, the points of 



difference must be carefully noted, albeit the fact that 
we note the points of difference is the surest proof of 
essential liken 

Chesterfield is caustic upon those " great scholars " 
who, u most absurdly,'' draw their maxims from what 
they call Parallels in the ancient authors ; without con- 
sidering, that, in the first place, there never were, since 
the creation of the world, two cases exactly parallel ; 
and next, that there never was a case stated, or even 
known, by any historian, with ever}- one of its circum- 
stances ; which, however, ought to be known, in order 
to be reasoned from. His lordship had known these 
absurdities carried so far by people of injudicious learn- 
ing, that he declares he should not be surprised if some 
of them were to propose, "while we are [174S] at war 
with the Gauls, that a number of geese should be kept 
in the Tower," on account of the infinite advantage 
which Rome received, " in a parallel case," from a cer- 
tain number of those sage (or sage and onions) birds in 
the Capitol. He may have laughed, perhaps, in his day 
— only that pattern of politest peers was above laughter 
— at so unlucky a hit as Dryden once made in the way 
of a prophetic parallel, in his poem on the Prince of 
>rn on the I Oth of June, : 

f our victorious Edward, as they say, 

a prince on that propitious day, 
Why may not 

luce his like, but with a I 
may carr 
The terror that his famed for 

The contest of Civilifl with Rome is taken by Mr. 
Motle] markable foreshadowing <»f the sub; 

that future contlict with Spain, thr 
which the .11 republic, fifteen centuries late: 

to be L The character, lie remarks, the events, 



380 HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF. 

the battles on sea and shore, the desperate sieges, the 
slippery alliances, the traits of generosity, audacity, and 
cruelty, the trustful confidence, the broken faith, seem so 
closely to repeat themselves, that History appears to 
present the self-same drama played over and over again, 
with but a change of actors and costume. He descries 
more than a fanciful resemblance between Civilis and 
William the Silent, two heroes of ancient German stock, 
who had learnt the arts of war and peace in the 
service of a foreign and haughty world-empire ; the 
ambition of each was subordinate to the cause which he 
served, for both refused the crown, although each, per- 
haps, contemplated, in the sequel, a Batavian realm of 
which he would have been the inevitable chief. Both, 
it is added, offered the throne to a Gallic prince, for 
Classicus was but the prototype of Anjou, as Brinno of 
Brederode, and neither was destined in this world to see 
his sacrifices crowned with success. 

Marcus Aurelius averred, that by looking back into 
history, one might be able to "almost prophesy upon 
the future," so strangely uniform are things past, present, 
and to come. " De tout temps les choses en pareil cas 
se sont passees a peu pres de meme," says another 
meditating spirit sur Veternelle ressemblance de ces eternel- 
les vicissitudes. De Quincey cites it as the opinion of 
one he deems the subtlest and most convincing (if not the 
most useful) philosopher whom England has produced, 
that a true knowledge of history confers the gift of 
prophecy; or that intelligently and sagaciously to have 
looked backwards, is potentially to have looked for- 
wards. It is admitted for certain that the political 
movements of nations obey everlasting laws, and travel 
through the stages of known cycles, which thus insure 
enough of resemblance to guarantee the general outline 
of a sagacious prophecy ; so that sameness enough there 



HISTORICAL CYCLES AXD PARALLELS. 3S1 

will always be to encourage the true political seer, with 
difference enough to confer upon each revolution its own 
separate character and its peculiar interest. Coleridge 
complained, that as even- age has, or imagines it has, 
its own circumstances which render past experience no 
longer applicable to the present case, there are never 
wanting answers and explanations and specious fallacies 
of hope. " I well remember," says he in The I'r'und, 
"that when the examples of former Jacobins, Julius 
Ca:sar, Cromwell, etc., were adduced in France and 

Jand, at the commencement of the French Consulate, 
it was ridiculed as pedantry and pedants' ignorance, to 
fear a repetition of such usurpation at the close of the 
enlightened eighteenth century." It was from quite 
another standpoint that Jeffrey alleged the adage of 
nothing new under the sun, to be a reflection more and 
more impressed upon him, the more minutely he was 
enabled to inform himself of the events and opinions 
of former time- same sanguine anticipations, the 

same groundless alarm, the same indestructible pre- 
judices, and the same infallible panaceas, continue, said 
he, with slight modifications, to occupy and amuse the 
spirit of successive general 1 bile the world g 

on in its own grand and undisturbed pr :., to the 

equal disappointment of the enthusiast and the alarmist. 
Soc ver changing; but amidst the infinite diver- 

sity of human affairs, there are. cer- 

neral principles of universal application, and the 
neglect or observance of which has led, in all 
the 

The • led 

him to the conclusion that history is M tin va-€t-vient t 

un jeu lie perpetuel." 1 had 

Philosopher Chips been led to the ti that the uni- 

.h turned round, 



332 THE SEEING EYE. 

that in a certain period of time (27,762 years) every- 
thing was to happen over again. 

It is one of the poets of our day who gives us to 
understand that 

" Dame History is so old, she knows not well 
Present from Past. She loves to say her say 
Till it is stale, and the same story tell 
To-morrow as she told it yesterday." 



XXXV. 

THE SEEING EYE.. 

ECCLESIASTES U. 14 ; ISAIAH xlii. 20. 

THESE be among the words of the Preacher, the 
son of David, king of Jerusalem : " The wise man's 
eyes are in his head ; but the fool walketh in darkness." 
The seeing eye, and the hearing ear, the Lord hath made 
them both. But there is such a thing as an eye that 
sees not. There are eyes and eyes ; or, as the well- 
known title runs, Eyes and No Eyes. " Seeing many 
things, but thou observest not/' we read in the prophecies 
of Isaiah. 

Men with an Eye are, in point of phrase, the peculiar 
people of Mr. Carlyle. In them his soul delighteth, and 
for him it may be almost said that their might makes 
right. " For Ziethen too had good ey r esight," he says of 
a favourite, in his latest history ; and the next chapter 
opens with a description of George II., whose "eyes, 
proud as Jove's, are nothing like so perspicacious : and 
he has to scan with them, and unriddle, under pain of 
death, such a waste of insoluble intricacies, troubles, and 
world-perils as seldom was, — even in dreams/'' Where 
no vision is, on the part of rulers, the people perish. 



MR. CARLYLES 'MEN WITH AN EYE: 3S3 

The appeal of Moses to Hobab, not to leave him and 
his people in the wilderness, urges this reason for his 
continuance with them, " Thou mayest be to us instead 
of eyes." Like those of the children of Issachar that 
had understanding of the times, to know what Israel 
ought to do. 

In dealing with such a statesman as Oliver Cromwell, 
the philosopher of hero-worship finds occasion every- 
where to note the decisive practical " eye M of the man, 
and his genuine " insight " into what is fact Such an 
intellect, he maintains, in his defence of Oliver's sincerity, 
does not belong to a false man : the false man sees false 
shows, plausibilities, expediencies ; the true man is 
d to discern even practical truth. Cromwell's 
counsel about the Parliament army, for instance, early in 
the contest, "is advice by a man vrhosaw. Fact answers, 
into Fact ! " Mirabeau, again : " With rich 
munificence, in a most blinkard, bespectacled, lOgic- 
chopping generation, Nature has gifted this man with an 
eye." Danton: "This man also, like Mirabeau, has a 
natural 9/*,* and begins to see whither Constitutionalism 
is tending." Later again, in the French Revolution 
chapter on the Death of Mirabeau: "Of men who, in 
such sense, are alive, and see with eyes, the number is 
: it" In an earlier work Mr. Carlyle had 

explained the wise man and the strong to be he that has 
it into what is what, into what will follow out o[ 
what, the eye to see and the hand to do ; and it is the 
that sees, before the head can see. The 
prevailing defect of the age bewailed by him in Past and 

than «»f .some eye- 
sight 1 titious blockheads of the Twelfth 

♦The italics. occurring in these ext 1 Mr. 

Carlyle, are that autl 



384 MR. CARLYLE ON CLEAR VISION. 

Century," as he ironically characterizes Abbot Samson 
and his like, " had no telescopes, but they still had an 
eye." " The clear-beaming eyesight of Abbot Samson, 
steadfast, severe, penetrating, — it is like Fiat lux in that 
inorganic waste whirlpool ; ;; that is to say, penetrating 
gradually into all nooks, of the chaos it makes a kosmos 
or ordered world. Elsewhere again he suggestively 
apostrophizes the reader : " Eyesight enough, O reader, 
a man in that case were a god, and could do various 
things ! ,} The nature of the being of our great men, 
he says, in the essay on Johnson, was, " that they lived 
not by Hearsay, but by clear Vision, . . . saw into 
the things themselves/'' etc. Cunning (as Cagliostro's) 
he declares to be the vehement exercise of a short, poor 
vision, of an intellect sunk, bemired, which can attain to 
no free vision, otherwise it would lead the esurient man 
to be honest. And in the sequel to that essay, The Dia- 
mond Necklace, a leading theme is the reflection, " Of the 
eyes that men do glare withal so few can see." Quite an 
anax andron is the potentate in Dryden's adaptation of 
Chaucer, every inch a king, — with 

" Eyes that confest him born for kingly sway, 
So keen, they flashed intolerable day." 

Applicable in a largely applied sense to the philosophy 
of veritable insight, is the sententious utterance of Euna- 
pius, that to see with the mere bodily eye is one thing ; 
to perceive with the mind, quite another : "Erepov tl 
icrrl ra vco Oewpelv, ftal rols rod crcofiaTos a7raT7]Xot<; ofMfLa- 
ctlv. All too often it happens that, as Churchill words it, 

" the Eye, that nicest sense, 

Neglects to send intelligence 
Unto the Brain, distinct and clear, 
Of all that passes in her sphere" — 

a fact overlooked, as are the lessons it may teach, by 
those who fail to distinguish between eyes and no eyes, 



ONE-EYED STRENGTH OF SIGHT. 3S5 

the mere seeing and the observing what is seen, the mere 

sight of the eyes and the action of reason thereupon — 

(i Not thinking, though they're wondrous wise, 
That few have reason, most have eyes." 

And he goes on to say, that where Nature reason doth 
deny, no art can that defect supply ; whereas, if a man 
should want an eye or two, are there not quack oculists, 
equal to the occasion ? — 

"As well prepared, beyond all doubt, 
To put eyes in, as put them out." 

The one-eyed is king in the city of the blind. To see 
clearly with one eye is a not uncommon gift, and re- 
striction, with men accepted in the world as successful 
and apt for leadership. Their vision is unduly limited, 
but to the extent of it they see distinctly enough. 

David Hartley, in his chapter on the Faculties of 
Brutes, refers to persons of narrow capacities and acqui- 
sitions, who yet excel greatly in some particular pursuit; 
showing great ingenuity in their own line of things — a 
line of length without breadth — and in some others that 
bonier thereupon within certain limits ; but "quite lost 
and confounded " if questioned on alien topics. Like 
telia, in the American story, they may have 
a "clear, strong, active mind/' and think with great 
strength within certain narrow limits ; but overpass those 
Limits, and you overtax their powers. A refined critic 
! .Id of Crabbe, that he explored with wonderful 

accuracy the depths and shallows of minds, however 
lar, which were of a certain calibre only ; that 
nothing escaped th and penetrating gaze of those 

inquiring eyes but what was set too far above or beyond 
their >ugham credit for extra- 

ordinary intensity <>f vision for present 1 ind imme- 

,but pronounced him far from equally clear- 

<r tlie permanent 
c c 



386 ONE-EYED CLEARNESS OF VISION. 

welfare of humanity. Dr. John Brown suggestively says 
of Art and Science, in his contrasted parallel of the two, 
that while Art uses one eye, and Science the other, Wis- 
dom uses both, and is stereoscopic, discerning solidity 
as well as surface, and seeing on both sides ; its vision 
being the unum quid of two images.* It is all very well 
for Butler to remind us, in his satire Upon the A buse of 
Human Learning, that 

" men that wink with one eye see more true, 

And take their aim much better than with two." 

But for general and practical purposes of vision two are 
better. And even two " eyes of wall " are better than 
none, or than one — to apply what the same satirist has 
to say in Hudibras of certain 

" eyes of wall ; 

I would say eye, for he had but one, 
As most agree, though some say none." 

Mr. Stuart Mill owns to a large tolerance for one-eyed 
men, provided their one eye is a penetrating one ; if 
they saw more, they would probably not see so keenly, 
nor so eagerly pursue one course of inquiry. In 
Bentham he finds a curious example of what Mr. Carlyle 
strikingly calls " the completeness of limited men ;" for 
in the Jeremy aforesaid we have a philosopher happy 
within his narrow boundary as no man of indefinite 
range ever was ; who, in respect of poetry, for instance, 
flatters himself that he is so completely emancipated 
from the essential law of poor human intellect, by which 
it can only see one thing at a time well, that he can 
even turn round upon the imperfection and lay a solemn 
interdict upon it. Another dissertator on the pursuits 
of jurisprudence, who calls law a merciless tyrant, which 

* Bacon, we are reminded, somewhere calls Science and Art a 
pair of Cyclops, just as Kant calls them twin Polyphemes. 



FULL OF FYES WITH IX. 3S7 

conquers and subdues the strongest heads, observes of 
the man who has passed his life in the application of 
positive rules to facts, that he can generally do little else: 
" His interiors are closed, and like a man long confined 
in prison his perception of all that is within his reach is 
sharpened, but his sense of all that is outside is dulled. " 
Mr. Buckle remarks of the English contemporaries of 
John Hunter, that, prudent, sagacious, but short-sighted, 
seeing few things at a time, but seeing those things with 
admirable clearness, they were unable to appreciate his 
comprehensive speculations. The depredators of Colum- 
bus arc characterized by one of his biographers as those 
politicians of petty sagacity and microscopic eye, who, 
in all great undertakings, can discern the immediate 
expense, without having scope of vision to embrace the 
future profit. A narrow, yet penetrating intellect, 
observes a practised student of character, sees a certain 
way into a higher intelligence, but beyond that is in the 
dark, and that which is beyond may involve the deepest 
and most distinctive parts of the man. Satire is seen 
to work constantly in this way — not only the keen 
pointed satire we find in books, but the frivolous shallow 
Ire of private life — "true as far as it goes, but not 
attaining to the real inner man at all." Even to be 
Argus-eyed is nothing so very god-like if each of the 
plurality of eyes can see but a little way; and the 
homo of Apuleius who is perspicacior Lynceo vel Argo x ft 

OCUleus totu all over, or indeed (and rather) all 

may be purblind as regards depth of vision and 

real insight The living creatures of the Apocalypse are 

full within The light of th< is a light 

that ne. :i sea "l" shore. Such light is the life of 

met , ;i by Him, the true Light, that lightened] 

ry man that cometh into the world. Missing which, 
the light that i.^ in them is darkness ; and if so, how 



388- EYES AND NO EYES. 

great is that darkness. In this, as in so many other and 
lower senses, there are eyes and no eyes. 

The familiar story of Eyes and No Eyes was a 
favourite one with the late Baron Alderson, and one he 
would refer to in enforcing the culture of the " observing 
faculty," especially when taking one's walks abroad, in 
field and grove, by the sea-side or along the water-courses, 
One of this faculty will pause by what seems to the non- 
observant a barren heap of stones, to examine the wild 
flower that has forced its way through the crevices ; he 
will, like the old recluse in the Caxton Essays, point 
with his stick to what seems to his duller-eyed though 
younger companion to be but empty space, till, looking 
long and steadily, he too sees the gossamer, sailing slow 
over the niggard stubbles ; — in all respects but those of 
age and seclusion a salient contrast to Wordsworth's 
picture of one who 

" travels on, a solitary man ; 

His age has no companion. On the ground 
His eyes are turned, and, as he moves along, 
They move along the ground ; and evermore, 
Instead of common and habitual sight 
Of fields with rural works, of hill and dale, 
And the blue sky, one little span of earth 
Is all his prospect. Thus, from day to day, 
Bow-bent, his eyes for ever on the ground, 
He plies his weary journey ; seeing still, 
And seldom knowing that he sees, some straw," 

or scattered leaf, or wheel-track, and nothing above or 
beyond. To the same category may be consigned that 
"hard-featured man in a railway rug," the fellow-traveller 
for many long miles of another of our well-read essayists, 
who in vain essayed to interest him on any subject what- 
ever, so mum was the man, though he " could scarcely 
be silently observing and commenting upon the works 
of Nature in the landscape without, for he never looked 



KEEN OBSERVERS OF NATURE. 

out of the window, and kept h ly wide 

awake they were) upon one particular check of his rail- 
way rug." Perhaps he was not in the vein that day, not 
\ie mood and present tense ; and haply he could have 
gazed e :d fixedly had the humour taken him ; 

for to the most and the best of us there are moods and 
tenses when, as Gresset words it, 

lie spectacles qu'autrefois 
On voyait avec nonchalance, 
Transportent aujourcThui, presentent des appas 
Inconnus a lindiiTerer. 
Et que la foule ne voit pis." 

increase of insight is justly said to be increase of 
pleasurable sources. Hence the welcome accorded by 
the thoughtful to the addition made within the I 
twenty years to possible pleasures, by the study of such 
objects as rockpools and wayside ponds — thousands of 
amateurs having joined professed naturalists so far as to 
learn at least to look with new and keen interest at any 
little quiet patch of water with a green, mantling sur- 
face, or a margin of water-plants. It is the unobservant 
alone that never find an; interesting, curious. 

or wonderful in their path. Almost miraculous is the 
hich the faculty of observation can be culti- 
vat xperience will show. Where 

the inbred follows upon the inborn, ti lopment 

is of course abnormal in dc perhaps it is to be 

reckoned in kind also. That "marvellous b ard 

bed by a brother philosopher as tak 
photograph -ything I :na, the 

mind, — photographs that ncv 
of 
pre -hird that alights on 

thd ted and glorious lid S .ire Hamley 



39° EYES AND NO EYES. 

pleased and proud to say of his younger son, that 

" Roger knows a deal of natural history, and finds out 

queer things sometimes. He'd have been off a dozen 

times during this [country] walk of ours, if he'd been 

here : his eyes are always wandering about, and see 

twenty things where I only see one. Why ! I've known 

him bolt into a copse because he saw something fifteen 

yards off — some plant, maybe, which he'd tell me was 

very rare, though I should say I'd seen its marrow at 

every turn in the woods ; and if we came upon such a 

thing as this/' touching a delicate film of a cobweb upon 

a leaf with his stick as he spoke, " why, he could tell you 

what insect or spider made it, and if it lived in rotten 

firewood, or in a cranny of good sound timber, or deep 

down in the ground, or up in the sky, or anywhere." 

Miss Tytler, in her Huguenot story, sharpens a contrast 

between Milly Rolle and Yolande Duprey, in their 

capacities respectively for profiting by the experiences 

of Corner Farm. Yolande would have been at home in an 

English Siberia, and would have found a thousand objects 

of interest and observation a lifetime before Milly Rolle 

— making herself acquainted with the local names and 

the rural annals, and getting at once to be friends with 

the farm stock entire, so that the " great mild Juno eyes 

of the oxen " looked into hers with a familiar greeting. 

Mrs. Norton bears witness to the observant eye of 

Rogers ( " to the keen eye of thy poetic mind " ) in her 

poem of The Winter's Walk with him : 

" And nought escaped thee as we walked along, 
Nor changeful ray, nor bird's faint chirping song." 

Happy the nature that even to declining age retains 
the vivacity of inquiring vision that marks eager child- 
hood, like the mature observer in Montesquieu, who says 
of himself, "Je suis comme un enfant, dont les organes 
encore tendres sont vivement frappes par les moindres 



HAVIXG EYES AXD SEEIXG XOT. 391 

objets." A descriptive chapter of Oldtown Folks opens 
with a picturesque vignette of what might be seen at 
sunrise from a certain cast-iron spinster's bedroom 
window ; but " not a bit of all this saw Miss Asphyxia, 
though she looked straight out at it. Her eyes and 
the eyes of the cow, who, with her horned front, was 
serenely gazing out of the barn window on the same 
prospect, were equally unreceptive." It is possible to be 
horn-eyed, without having a horned front. 

Though to want eyes be indeed a great calamity, says 
Dr. South, yet to have eyes and not to see, adds a sting 
and a reproach to what would otherwise be but a mis- 
fortune. Plato divided mankind into those who have 
eyes and those who have none, and said that, while 
explorers of the former class see what comes before 
them in the course of their travels, because they bring 
eyes to see it, travellers of the second class return home 
no wiser than they went. The most powerful telescope, 
as one of his expositors remarks, is useless if the focus 
is not rightly adjusted to the eye. Equally so if there is 
no real seeing power in the eye — no speculation in it, as 
Macbeth says of Banquo's spiritual vision. An observer 
of an average crowd of visitors at the International 
Exhibition ventured to say, that not one in a hundred of 
them took in a single idea from any object to which the 
mind had no previous clue : all the strangeness, novelty, 
and beauty were passed by — were not visible, did not 
reach the brain, did not even catch the of the 

tit, bewildered gazer. The majority of all 

re likened to the woman who emigrated to 
America with her husband, and, returnii some 

to her native village, was asked wh.it she had 

plied, "as I see'd anythink per- 
tik'lar;" and if she had followed Humboldt over the 
world, it is presumed she would have said the same. 



392 EYES AND NO EYES. 

M. Nestor Roqueplan insists that a long stay in the 
country makes the eyes look stupid : the habit of seeing 
empty spaces, on his showing, gives an idiotic uncer- 
tainty, whereas to see shops and passers-by gives it a 
curiously-inquiring and wide-awake look. To this it 
has been answered, that not every man is affected by the 
country in the same way : for example, a man who has 
studied botany, or geology, or landscape-painting, and is 
warmly interested in one of these pursuits, or even a 
man who is interested in agriculture and domestic 
animals, is sure to find a great deal to arrest his atten- 
tion even in what may be considered a dull part of the 
country, still more in districts which are full of what 
specially interests him. As good observers as the French 
critic have not observed that the students of nature have 
stupid eyes. 

Dr. Arnold complains of that Silanus the Greek his- 
torian, who, living with Hannibal daily, might have told 
us so much, that he " saw and heard without heeding." 
Where were his eyes ? They might have been of glass, 
glassy, for all they seem to have taken in ; or such a 
pair, say, as that described in the Odyssey, — 

11 Of horn the stiff relentless balls appear, 
Or globes of iron fixed in either sphere." 

Or such another, quite another, pair — yet in effect the 
same mere organic matter — as those of MackworthPraed's 
Lilian, who had never known thought and reason — 

"So you might guess from her eyes' dim rays, 
And her idiot laugh, and her vacant gaze, 
And the light of her eye so boldly obscure." 

The late William Smith, in one of his metaphysical 
works, commented feelingly on the passive stare, expres- 
sive of nothing, so often to be observed in the faces of 
the labouring poor — let the light fall upon those big dull 



VACANT STARE. 393 



eyes from what object it may, they seem to be ever 
gazing, vacant into vacancy. So again Lord Lytton 
pictures an old rustic, gazing on space with " that vacant 
stare which so often characterizes the repose and relaxa- 
tion of the uneducated poor." Sterne describes " that 
perplexed vacuity of face which puzzled souls generally 
stare with." It was accounted one of the main triumphs 
of Garrick's art, that he could make the twin stars, each 
a bright particular star, which Nature had stuck in his 
head, appear as dull as two coddled gooseberries. Like 
5S eus, as transformed by Pallas, and as "traduced" 
by Mr. Pope or one of his staff — 

" Xo longer in the heavy eye-ball shined 
The glance divine, forth-beaming from the mind." 

Such command over expression has Talfourd's Athenian 
captive, with her face of " marble solitude," whose large 
eye once indeed " kindled with frightful lustre; but the 
shade 

" Passed instant thence ; her face resumed its look 
Of stone." 

A sort of dead-alive contrast to the supernatural lustre 
and eloquence of the pictured eyes gleaming from tar- 
rj frames in Hood's Haunted House : 

'• Not merely with the mimic life that lies 
Within the compass of An's simulation ; 

:r souls were looking through their painted eyes 
With awful speculation." 

What a picture, word-painted, is that other one by Flood 
of the drowned woman' "staring s<> blindly! 

i • iring, through muddy impurity, as when 

with the darn if despairing fixed on futurity." 

Mr. 1» in the- midst of the dolls with no 

lation in their eyes, " the prostrate figure of dead 

Mr. Dolls with no Speculation in hi-." In M r. Thai ker- 

Inians we have Harry Warrington calling Lady 



394 STARING AND GLARING. 

Maria " angel ! " and looking into her face with his 
eager, honest eyes ; and although " two fishpools irradi- 
ated by a pair of stars would not kindle to a greater 
warmth than did those elderly orbs into which Harry 
poured his gaze," he plunged into their blue depths, we 
are told, and fancied he saw heaven in their calm bright- 
ness. To do Lady Maria justice, she does not appear 
to have forced any particular semblance of expression 
into the elderly orbs. Some people strain and overstrain 
their powers in that respect portentously ; witness the 
published portrait of some small author as described by 
a Fraser critic, who declined to believe that there ever 
lived the man whose eyes could habitually bear that ex- 
pression of gleaming glare ; for only by a violent effort 
could the expression be produced, and then for a very 
short time only, without serious injury to the optic 
nerve. " The eyes were made as large as possible ; and 
the thing after which the poor fellow had been struggling 
was that peculiar look which may be conceived to 
penetrate through the beholder, and pierce his inmost 
thoughts ; " just the sort of expression which, in the 
critic's estimate, might produce a great effect on the 
gallery of a minor theatre. Or, in high-coloured word- 
painting, it might tell in sensation fiction, together with 
such optical aspects as one we get of Dred in the great 
dismal swamp, his eye fixed before him on vacancy, the 
pupil swelling out in glassy fulness, with a fixed som- 
nambulic stare. 

Bielfeld's description of the person of the second of 
our four Georges includes the item, " big blue eyes, 
perhaps rather of parboiled character, though proud 
enough ; eyes flush with his face or more, rather ' in 
relief than on a level with it," — so Mr. Carlyle 
Englishes Bielfeld, and interpolates the characteristic 
gloss : " afleur de tite, after the manner of a fish, if one 



SOULLESS GAZE. 395 

might say so, and betokening such an intellect behind 
them !" The protuberant large brown eyes of Silas 
Marner are familiar to George Eliot's readers, — eyes 
that saw nothing very distinctly that was not close to 
them, and staring dreadfully at that ; stress is laid on 
the absence of special observation in his pale face, and 
on that defenceless, deer-like gaze which belongs to 
large prominent eyes. With change of character comes 
change of expression ; and " the prominent eyes that 
used to look so trusting and dreamy, now looked as if 
they had been made to see only one kind of thing that 
was very small, like tiny grain, for which they hunted 
everywhere." A recent dissertator on short sight is 
eloquent upon the stony stare, the lack-lustre eye, which 
seems somehow never in focus with the eye that looks 
into it, and suggests the soulless gaze of a photograph. 
He takes the terrible Gorgo, whose glance turned all 
who looked upon her into stone, to have been simply 
ited girl ; the same idea being implied in 
the three Gorgones having but one eye between them. 
In the case of her modern representative, of either 
who, it is asked, can well help feeling, under that fixed 
and glassy stare, the kindliness of his nature rapidly 
turn to ice ? Who, it is further asked, has not felt, at a 
dinncr-part\' even, the numbing, freezing influence where 
ill or spectre, if not more, sits. SO to say, 
statue-like, the soul to all appearance drawn into itself, 
dull to the nervous efforts of host or hostess, turning 
just as you think you have caught a look to open 

n withal ? "The very lover 'sighing his 

soul into his lady's face* fails, with all his conscious 

glow of rapture and all his beseeching looks, to kindle 

• intelligence, or to catch one responsive 
mpathetic sign. lie feels himself gradually, but 

t inevitably, turned to .stone." But those short- 



396 STRANGELY-FIXED SIGHTLESS GAZE. 

sighted eyes of Mr. Gage, in Miss Tytler's fiction, are 
declared by Yolande to resemble nothing but the 
evening star when the dew is falling ; and Grand'mere 
assents to the resemblance, and admires them too as 
eyes with a short sight for the present, and a far sight 
for the future. No marvel to her that they are both 
unfathomable and effulgent, " for they have done as 
great things as the Italian who went down into the 
Inferno — they have looked into eternity, those eyes, and 
it is reflected in their glance." For some that super- 
natural vision is too much, and the brain turns, and the 
eye becomes vacant. Mr. Reade pictures the face of a 
maniac, whose eyes, bereft of reason, conveyed no images 
to the sentient brain; it is a face seen at the window of 
an asylum, and by some half-vegetable instinct this 
darkened man has turned towards the morning sun, and 
is staring it full in the face : the rays strike and sparkle 
on those glassy orbs, and fire them ; yet they never so 
much as wink. Janet Dempster is painted with wide- 
open black eyes that had a strangely-fixed sightless 
gaze, as she paused in the street, and stood silent before 
her brutal husband. So again George Eliot's Sir Christo- 
pher, after a single day and night of grief have aged the 
fine old man, is described as changed in complexion to 
a dull and withered look, with a swollen ridge under the 
eyes ; " and the eyes themselves, which used to cast so 
keen a glance on the present, had the vacant expression 
which tells that vision is no longer a sense, but a 
memory." On an after page we read of Maynard Gilfil 
shocked at the aspect of Tina "with madness in her 
eyes, looking and looking, and yet not seeing him." So 
the Carlingford needlewoman, in Salem Chapel, is de- 
scribed, standing opposite to Vincent, " gazing with eyes 
that went beyond that figure, and yet dwelt upon it." 
" The eyes in their blank brightness paused at him for a 



'NO SPECULATIOX IX THOSE EVES.' 397 

moment before they passed to the vacant air on which 
they were always fixed." So with Sarah in the Dead 
Seeret, when Uncle Joseph, starting to his feet, asks her 
is she ill ? " She turned round slowly, and looked at 
him with eyes void of all expression, with eyes that 
seemed to be staring through him vacantly at something 
beyond." Delaroche's painting of Napoleon before his 
abdication at Fontainebleau moves the author of Hone 
Subseeii'tc to a bit of word-painting on the subject of the 
:iperor's whole mind looking through them, 
— bodily distress, want of sleep, fear, doubt, shame, 
astonishment, anger, speculation, seeking rest but as yet 
finding it not ; going over all possibilities, calm, con- 
founded, but not confused. All this the critic discerns 
in those grey, serious, perplexed eyes ; nor does he 
remember to have ever seen " anything at once so subtle 
awful, and touching, as their dreary look." How different 
from that pair in the broad head of Dr. Chalmers, which 
rver elsewhere describes as not vacant, but 

p — innocent, mild, and large; the soul within not 
always at that window, but often seemingly conspicuous 
by its absence. Of the Olivia Murehmont of fiction we 
read, " There was no speculation in those large lustreless 

fixed upon the dim light of the c. indies. But, for 
all that, the mind was not a blank." To the same pen 

.ve the portrait of a veteran detective, the fixed ex- 

ion of whose face is a stony glare, the relentlessness 

of his gaze having very little relation to the ob; 

which he gazes. When he is listening with all his 

might, lie has a trick of looking away from the speaker, 

and Staring OUt of the window, with a stolid glare in his 

1h.1t tells no tales, unless to those who know him 

:. It is his policy to cultivate the mien of that .Mr. 

witch in another tale, who i.-, described as looking 

at his em] with eyes that had no more specul 



398 'NO SPECULATION IN THOSE EYES: 

in them than if they had been boiled. Such eyes pass 
muster in the crowd, if we may take Sir Gilbert's word 
for it in the play, when he tells how Parson Dosey's right 
eye dropped into the fish-tray as he was playing a pool of 
quadrille with three elderly maidens ; and how astonished 
they all were, the knight included ; " for none of us had 
ever discovered the defect, although he has been in the 
parish for so many years ; but in a twinkling he whipped 
it into the socket ; and when I looked him in the face/' 
why, protests Sir Gilbert in his own emphatic diction, 
there was just as much meaning in that eye, as in every 
other about the table. 

One of Mrs. Oliphant's heroes looks at an adviser 
with " those sceptical, clear-sighted eyes, which, more 
than anything else, make a practical man ashamed, of 
having indulged in any momentary aberration." What 
a pair of wide-awake, dangerous eyes ! exclaims Dr. 
John Brown of a certain pair that have no " speculation" 
in them, no looking before or after, but looking into the 
present — the immediate. Coleridge somewhere likens 
certain critical eyes to those of the Indian spider, aranea 
prodigiosa, as becoming in effect clouded microscopes, 
to exaggerate and distort. Lovers of his poems may 
recall the line in Christabel, " Why stares she with un- 
settled eye ?" said of Geraldine. Students of his Aids 
to Reflection may recall his analysis of an eye as it lies on 
the marble slab of a dissecting room, — and the query, 
" Is this cold jelly the light of the body?" And who 
can forget Jean Paul's tremendous dream, when he 
looked up to the immeasurable world for the Divine 
Eye, and it glared upon him with an empty, black, 
bottomless Eye-socket? As mucl^ more appalling than 
those " open eyes," in Shelley, 

" whose fixed and glassy light 

Mocked at the speculation they had owned," 

as eternity is than time. 



XXXVI. 
BE A UTIFUL IN SEASON. 

ECCLESIASTES ill. I, II. 

TO everything there is a season, the Preacher in- 
structs us, and a time to every purpose under the 
heaven. And he who notably had seen the travail which 
God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it, 
had this to add : " He hath made everything beautiful in 
his time/' Everything. A comprehensiveness exceed- 
ing that of the moonlight meditation in Shakspeare, — 

u How many things by season seasoned are 
To their right praise and true perfection." 

Les belles e/wses, says La Bruyere, le sunt vioitis Jwrs 
de leur place : les bienseances mettent la perfection* Sounds 
inharmonious in themselves and harsh, says Cowper, yet 
heard in scenes where peace for ever reigns, and only 
there, please highly for their sake. Barry Cornwall 
poetizes a remonstrance with the nightingale for singing 
at midday ; he would have the strain delayed till downy 
Eve into her twilight woods hath flown : the " holy " 
strain, he calls it, that should be listened to when other 
sounds are hushed : 

I he insect noise, the human folly 

turb thy grave thoughts with their din. 
Then cease awhile, bird Melancholy, 

I when the fond Night heirs,- begin." 

Had not Portia said long before, in the lines preceding 

the very p previously quoted on things seasonable, 

that the nightingale, if she should sing by day, when 

every go ickling, would be thought no better a 

musician than the wren? The Biron of Love's Labour's 

Lost touches on the same theme when he prot< 



4oo BEAUTIFUL IN SEASON. 

"At Christmas I no more desire a rose 
Than wish a snow in May's new-fangled shows ; 
But like of each thing that in season grows." 

In the spring, is a Locksley Hall reminder, a fuller 
crimson comes upon the robin's breast ; in the spring 
the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest ; in the 
spring a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove ; and 
beautiful is the season, and beautiful are the changes 
wrought by it, for the season's sake. But, as Arch- 
deacon Hare has somewhere said, the locks which curl 
so gracefully round the downy glowing cheeks of the 
child, would ill become the man's furrowed brow, and 
must grow white in time ; and then too they will 
have a beauty of their own, if the face express that 
sobriety and calmness and purity which accord with 
them. Says the King in Hamlet — and many are the 
good things even King Claudius can say, how many 
soever the bad ones he may have done, — 

" Youth no less becomes 
The light and careless livery that it wears, 
Than settled age his sables and his weeds." 

Youth, says Currer Bell, has its romance, and maturity 
its wisdom, as morning and spring have their freshness, 
noon and summer their power, night and winter their 
repose. "Each attribute is good in its own season." 
Every qualification, says Miss Austen, is raised at times, 
by the circumstances of the moment, to more than its 
real value. 

" Ev'ry season hath its pleasures ; 

Spring may boast her flow'ry prime, 
Yet the vineyard's ruby treasures 
Brighten autumn's sob'rer time." 

But the daisy, as Mr. Peacock argues, has more 
beauty in the eyes of childhood than the rose in those 
of maturer life. The spring is the infancy of the year ; 



BE A UTIFUL IX SEA SOX. \o I 

its flowers are the flowers of promise ; those of autumn 
are little loved, and less praised. The wisdom of winter 
is the folly of spring, was a maxim with Dr. Arnold. 
The many advantages of the calm autumn of life, as 
well as of the year, are commented on by Mrs. Montagu 
in one of her letters to Lord Karnes (in 1782). Both 
have a peculiar serenity — a genial tranquillity, she says : 

busy and agitated, because the hope of the 
spring and the vivid delights of the summer are over ; 
but these tranquil seasons have their appropriate enjoy- 
ments, and " a well-regulated mind sees everything 
beautiful that is in the order of nature." Yet was it 
a pet and practical axiom with this Lady of the Last 
Century, that life never knows the return of spring, 
and that the young should be encouraged in gathering 
the primroses of their time. 

It is in one of the same celebrated lady's letters of 
appeal for contributions to her " feather-hangings" (re- 
corded in Cowper's verse) that, praying a correspondent 
to reserve the feathers of the Michaelmas goose for her 
pur; the neck and breast feathers of that brave 

very useful — she delivers herself of the 
reflection, "Things homely and vulgar are sometimes 

I than the elegant, and the feathers of the 
go<> . lapted to some occasions than 

the plumes of the phoenix." And the sentiment is £S- 
thetical, not utilitarian. 

" Colours seen by candle-light 

Will QOt look the same by clay." 

D in Coleridge's pathetic metaphor, are the 

morning, but the tears of mournful eve. 

" Even for our kit< b 
kill the fowl in season," 

pleads Isabella, in deprecation of Angelo's sentence on 

i) i) 



4Q2 A TIME TO LAUGH. 

Claudio out of season, — for her brother is " not prepared 
for death," — and shall we serve heaven with less respect 
than we do minister to our gross selves, in the season- 
able choice of a chicken ? A very homely illustration 
may sometimes point a weighty moral. 



XXXVII. 
A TIME TO LA UGH. 

ECCLESIASTES Hi. 4.* 

LIFE has been called a comedy to those who think, 
a tragedy to those who feel. But life is no laugh- 
ing matter to those who both think and feel, in any deep ■ 
sense of either thinking or feeling. Studied in the light 
of reason and of revelation, life is far from provocative 
of laughter. Even the laughter it provokes as a comedy 
is confessedly cynical. The Bible and Broad Grins will 
hardly do bound up together. Nevertheless, it is some- 
thing for lovers of a good laugh to be able to quote 
Scripture warrant for it. The most melancholy book of 
all the books which make up the Book of books recog- 
nizes " a time to laugh." A good laugh, then, in a good 
sense, can plead the express sanction of Scripture. A 
word spoken in due season, how good is it ! and a good 
laugh, if only within reason and in due season, how good 
is that, too ! Out of season, and out of all reason, just 
proportionably bad. 

To laugh in church, or at a funeral, is perhaps as 
unseasonable a feat as can well be named. Yet were 

* For another collection of illustrative comments on this pas- 
sage, see First Series of Secular Annotations on Scripture Texts, 
pp. 296-300. 



LA UGH1XG IN CHURCH. 403 

it against both reason and charity to infer exceptional 
culpability in culprits of this degree, if, by constitution 
and circumstances combined, overtaken with a fault so 
deplorable. Themselves may be the foremost to deplore, 
and yet the first to do it again. Lamb tells Southey of 
his having been at Hazlitt's marriage, and nearly being 
turned out several times during the ceremony : " Any- 
thing awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a 
funeral.' 1 He could read about these ceremonies with 
pious and proper feelings. But to him the realities of 
life seemed only the mockeries. That came of his being 
a born humorist, with a spice of the metaphysician too. 
In his essay on a Wedding, Elia professes to know not 
what business he had to be present in solemn places ; 
for divest himself he could not of an unseasonable dis- 
position to levity upon the most awful occasions. He 
was the man of men to have made allowances for, and 
not to have put into a lunatic asylum, that Mr. Robinson, 
the cynic, whom we meet with as an inmate of SJiirlcy 
Hall Asylum, and who icon Id burst into violent fits of 
laughter in church and at funerals. Discharged from 
confinement as cured, and asked whether he considered 
himself perfectly safe from a return of the habit of 
laughing at serious subjects, that gentleman declared 
himself confident about it, except on one point ; on the 
subject of laughing in church he was still apprehensive, 
and for this reason: — he had once heard a clergyman 

ring the total absence, in a congregation, of con- 
ventional signs of the effect which the sermon is pro- 
ducing : "The jester knows the effect of his jest by 
the laugh that it ; the act<-r gets his appla 

; the member of Parliament hi >r cries of 

tion.' M Hut the preacher has n > index whatever; 

and this clergyman had expressed a wish that hi 

ition had tails, which they could wag "without (\'\^- 



404 PSALM-SINGING AND LAUGHING. 

turbing the silence of the place or the solemnity of the 
scene." Now Mr. Robinson could never get over this ; 
every sermon he afterwards listened to was for him spoilt 
by it. " If a pet parson entered the pulpit, I immediately 
saw all the feminine tails wagging. If he spoke of the 
duties of children to their parents, all the senile male 
tails wagged ; if of the duties of servants to their supe- 
riors, all the matronly tails were in agitation. And after 
a long dull sermon, when all bent forward to offer up 
their last prayer, there appeared a simultaneous wagging 
of all the tails of the congregation. The return of this 
feeling I alone fear/'' 

John Wesley regarded as clearly supernatural the 
"great laughter that prevailed in the congregation" at 
one time when he was preaching ; whereas his brother 
Charles, less credulous, was once and again able to de- 
tect an imposition, where John could only see a miracle. 
When both brothers were in what Southey calls " the 
first stage of their enthusiasm," they used to spend part 
of each Sunday in walking in the fields and singing 
psalms ; and upon one such occasion, just as they were 
beginning to set the stave, a sense of the ridiculous over- 
came Charles, who burst into a hearty and prolonged 
guffaw. " I asked him," says John, " if he was dis- 
tracted, and began to be very angry, and presently after 
to laugh as loud as he. Nor could we possibly refrain, 
though we were ready to tear ourselves in pieces, but 
were forced to go home without singing another line." 
Hysterical laughter, and that laughter which is as con- 
tagious as the act of yawning, when the company are in 
tune for it, Wesley believed to be the work of the devil 
— one of the many points in which Southey takes the 
parallel to hold good between " the enthusiasm of the 
Methodists and of the Papists." We are referred, for 
instance, to a grand diatribe of St. Pachomius against 



LAUGHING OX SOLEMN OCCASIONS. 405 

laughing ; but also to what is told in the Ac/a Sanctorum 
of the beatified Jordan, second general of the Domini- 
cans, who treated an hysterical affection of this kind 
with a degree of " prudence and practical wisdom not 
often to be found in the life of a Romish saint." Wit- 
ness his treatment of the novices who laughed in the face 
of the congregation, contagiously and consumedly : units 
ccepit ridere, ct alii hoc vidcutes similiter fortiter inccpcrunt 
ridere. Reproved by a superior, and commanded straitly 
and straightway to desist from that indecent outbreak, 
they only laughed on, and laughed the more : at illi 
ridebant. The service over, Jordan re- 
buked the rebuker for his rebuke, and turning to the 
novices said, " Laugh away with all your might ; I give 
you full licence. In good truth, you ought to laugh and 
be merry, forasmuch as you have made your way out of 
the devil's prison, and that the hard chains are snapped 
asunder by which for many years he held you bound. 
La -, then, beloved, laugh away." Ridete, ergo, 

carissimi, ridete. And the laughers are said to have been 
so comforted in mind by these words, that from that time 
forth they never could laugh beyond bounds or intern - 
: ct post ridere dissolute non potucrunt. 
When the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Jan 
accompanied to the altar, in the chapel at Whitehall, 
that ill-starred bridegroom, the Elector Palatine, after- 
wards tlie "struggling King of Bohemia," she could not 
help lai >ut loud at something which tickled her 

fancy. Dr. Chalmers "burst out" at a ludicrous incident 
at hi \ — "a business that is often accom- 

panied with tears" being thus converted . perfect 

frolic." That Marechal de I Saint-Simon 

ravest and most serious man in all 

IDCe, and the greatest slave to decorum, br 
into laughter once while in attendance on the Grand 



406 UNCONTROLLABLE LAUGHTER. 

Monarque at mass — the cause effective of this defect 
being a whispered sally of satirical song ; and when His 
Most Christian Majesty turned round in surprise to see 
whence came those unseasonable sounds, that surprise 
was greatly augmented by his finding who the culprit 
was, and beholding such a personage shaking himself all 
to fits, and the tears running down his cheeks. Aspasia, 
in Beaumont and Fletcher's Maid's Tragedy, deprecat- 
ing a " timeless smile," protests, 

" It were a fitter hour for me to laugh 
When at the altar the religious priest 
Were pacifying the offended powers 
With sacrifice." 

But laughter at such unfit times is notoriously on record. 
More than one of the Latin epigrammatists paraphrase 
the saw of the Greek gnomic poet, 

TeXcos amipos iv (SpoTols deivbv kokov. 

But when did such sententious philosophy avail to 
prevent a sudden burst of laughter from a tickled mid- 
riff? Thomas Hood cites his own experience of "laugh- 
ter mingling with lamentation in the chamber of death " 
itself. Henry Nelson Coleridge frankly avowed his 
" ungovernable tendency to laughter upon the most 
solemn occasions." Every one, Sir Walter Scott says, 
has felt that when a paroxysm of laughter has seized 
him at a misbecoming time and place, the efforts which 
he makes to suppress it, — nay, the very sense of the im- 
propriety of giving way to it, — tend only to augment and 
prolong the irresistible impulse. " The inclination to laugh 
becomes uncontrollable, when the solemnity and gravity 
of time, place, and circumstances render it peculiarly im_ 
proper." Judge Haliburton's travelled Yankee declares 
that " stiflin' a larf a'most stifles oneself, that's a fact." 
Casus plane deplorabilis ! used to be the cry of the doctor 
in Martimts Scriblerus when a case of immoderate laugh- 



OBS TREPERO US LA I 'CUTER. 407 

ter was submitted to him ; and he would give such 
patients over when he considered what an infinity of 
muscles " these laughing rascals u threw into a convulsive 
motion at the same time ; whether we regard the spasms 
of the diaphragm and all the muscles of respiration, the 
horrible rictus of the mouth, the distortion of the lower 
jaw, the crisping of the nose, twinkling of the eyes, 
or spherical convexity of the cheeks, with the u tremu- 
lous succussion " of the whole human body. One main 
characteristic of the Prussian Tobacco-Parliament im- 
mortalized by Mr. Carlyle, was roaring laughter, huge* 
rude, and somewhat vacant, as that of the Norse gods 
r their ale at Yule time; "as if the face of the 
Sphynx were to wrinkle itself in laughter ; or the fabu- 
lous Houyhnms themselves were there to mock in their 
peculiar fashion," at such horseplay as never elsewhere 
was seen. Mr. Forster describes Goldsmith's as a laugh 
ambitious to compete with Johnson's, which Tom Davies ? 
with an enviable knowledge of natural history, compared 
to the laugh of a rhinoceros ; and which appeared to 
Boswell, in their midnight walkings, to resound from 
Temple Kir to Fleet Ditch. Dr. Parr may have wished 
to compete with the elder and every way greater Doctor 
in that as in other respects, — judging by what Dc 
Quincey relates of his "obstreperous laugh — so mon- 
strously beyond the key of good society." Ridentem 
catuli ore Gallicani — the picture is a pretty one in 
neither sex, and the din is distracting. Charles Lamb, 
in <>ne <>f his letters, tells a correspondent of a visit he- 
ld at his office, from an eccentric acquaint- 
ed who laughed at his own joke with "a laugh which 
»t think the lungs < 'f mortal man were competent 

It was like a thousand people laughing, or tin- Gob- 
lin He imagined afterwards, it seems, thai the 

whole office had been laughing at him, so strange did his 



408 A GUFFAW. 



own sounds strike upon his " /z^/zsensorium/" The burst 
might have been likened, not merely to that of Scott's 
Goblin Page in the Lay, but to that of the "strange ex- 
travagant laughter " in Hood's Forge, or romance of the 
iron age, 

" a bellow of demon mirth, that far outroars the weather, 

As if all the hyaenas that prowl the earth had clubbed their 
laughs together." 

Leigh Hunt, when an inmate of Surrey Gaol, after 
the Government prosecution, appears to have been 
almost equally impressed by Haydon's laugh, even 
within prison walls : " He was here yesterday morning 
before I was up, calling for his breakfast, and sending 
those laughs of his about the place that sound like the 
trumpets of Jericho, and threaten to have the same 
effect," — namely, bring down the walls. The Shepherd 
in the Nodes is graphic about a guffaw, when he de- 
fines it to be " that lauchter that torments a' the inside 
o' the listener and looker-on, an internal earthquake that 
convulses a body frae the pow till the paw, frae the 
fingers till the feet, till a' the pent-up power o' risibility 
bursts out through the mouth, like the lang-smouldering 
fire vomited out o' the crater o' a volcawno, and then 
the astonished warld hears, for the first time, what 
heaven and earth acknowledge by their echoes to be 
indeed — a guffaw ! " Christopher North, in his Winter 
Rhapsody, cries fie on the " atrocious wickedness " of a 
great big, hearty, huge, hulking horse-laugh, in an assem- 
blage of ladies and gentlemen gathered gracefully toge- 
ther to enjoy the courtesies, the amenities, the urbanities 
and the humanities of cultivated Christian life : " the 
pagan who perpetuates it should be burnt alive — not at 
a slow fire, — though that would be but justice, — but at a 
quick one, that all remnants of him and his enormity 
may be speedily extinguished." Sir Charles Grandison's 



SILL Y LA i 'GHTER. 409 

Hon. Miss Byron is impatient of Miss Barnevelt as a 
"loud and fearless laugher. She hardly knows how to 
smile ; for as soon as anything catches her fancy, her 
voice immediately bursts her lips, and widens her mouth 
to its full extent.'''' Ben Jonson's Clerimont is equally 
impatient : " Oh, you shall see some women, when they 
laugh, you would think they brayed, it is so rude," etc. 
The long dry see-saw of such a horrible bray is Hartley 
Coler xt for a denunciation of harsh boisterous 

laughter, which he compares to the winding-up of a 
crazy church-clock, the hysterics of a " mastiff-bitch, " 
the lamentations of a patient in hydrophobia, and the 
Christmas psalmody of a catarrh-caught and coughing 
congregation. Not that he for one moment agrees with 
those pious Fathers who attributed all extempore laugh- 
ing to the agency of evil spirits ; but the mere mechani- 
cal convulsion of leathern lungs, uninformed by imagin- 
ation or feeling, was justly an offence to him. Lebrun's 
advice is stringent, u Gardez-vous d'un sot rire ; il n'est 
rien de plus sot." There is nothing, says Goethe, in 
which people more betray their character than in what 

ind to laugh at. The vacant, inane, causeless, but 

exuberant laughter of M ier in Miss Austen's 

isibility, is by no means unique : " Elinor 

could h.i\ :i everything but her laugh." Nothing, 

timate, is more troublesome than what are 

called lai: — the pr laugher bein 

mptible and tiresome a character as the prof 

:* wh<>m the <>n L ' striving something to 

laugh at, the other always laughing at nothing. " An 

- of levity is as impertinent as an 1 

gravity." picture is to the pur; 

u who did assay 

To laugh at shaking of the leavj 

Nothing sillier than silly laughter, Martial : R$Sk 



4io LA UGHTER IN EXCESS. 

inepto res ineptior nulla est, — and by inepto is meant 
misplaced, in effect unseasonable, out of due time and 
course, without justifying occasion, and therefore irra- 
tional, and by implication imbecile. A philosophic 
writer has said that the true character of earnestness is 
to laugh if there is anything to cause laughter, and not 
to laugh if there is nothing to laugh at. A French one 
says, that some folks laugh equally at what is ludicrous 
and what is not : if you are a fool, for instance, and give 
vent to some characteristic folly, they laugh at you ; if 
you are a wise man, and give utterance to nothing but 
what accords with reason and good sense, they laugh at 
you all the same. Risus abundat in ore stultorum. George 
Herbert's counsel is, 

" Laugh not too much : the witty man laughs least : 
For wit is news only to ignorance." 

Moliere's Cleonte puts a question that answers itself (in 
the negative) when he asks, " Vois-tu rien de plus im- 
pertinent que des femmes qui rient a tout propos }" In 
Shakspeare we have varied representations of laughter 
in excess — in those irrepressibly prolonged fits such as 
Sydney Smith and Tom Moore could indulge in 
together, even in the public streets, or such as, in his 
milder and more retired way, Cowper was capable of, 
as when he " lay awake half the night in convulsions of 
laughter - ''' at the story of John Gilpin, which Lady 
Austen had that evening related to him at Olney, 
with a vivacity and archness all her own. The merry 
lords, for instance, in Love's Labour's Lost, who 

" all did tumble on the ground, 

With such a zealous laughter so profound, 

That in this spleen ridiculous appears, 

To check their folly, passion's solemn tears " — 

a suggestive example of extremes meeting, and of the 
affinity of conflicting forces, in this strangely composite 



JAQUES, POSTHUMUS, ACHILLES. 411 

nature of ours. There is Jaques, again, in As You Like 
It, so tickled by the philosophy of the motley fool he 
met in the forest, that, says he, describing the colloquy 
with Touchstone, 

li My lungs began to crow like chanticleer, . . . 
And I did laugh, sans intermission, 
An hour by his dial." 

When Jaques, in a later act of the play, owns to the 
justice of Rosalind's charge, of his being by repute a 
melancholy fellow, — "I am so; I love it better than 
laughing," — she rejoins, " Those that are in extremity of 
either, are abominable fellows ; and betray themselves 
to every modern censure, worse than drunkards." Nc 
quid nimiSy whether of the ludicrous or the lugubrious, 
whether of grinning or of gloom. Iachimo is but 
libelling Posthumus when he pictures him to Imogen as 
" the jolly Briton/' laughing from his " free lungs," and 
crying, " O ! can my sides hold!" with " his eyes in 
flood with laughter." In Troilus and Crcssida, "there 
such laughing! — Queen Hecuba laughed, that her 
in over," and even "Cassandra laughed," and 
id all the rest so laughed ;" while in another 
scene we have Patroclus tickling Achilles with his 
scurril jests and burlesque mimicries, at which " fusty 
stuff — 

hiHes, on his pressed bed lolling, 
p chest laughs out a lend applause : 

. . . and at this sport 

Sir Valour d . oh [—enough, Patroclu 

ive DM ribs of steel ! I shall .split all 
In pleasure of my spleen." 

Shaksp -. n welcome of good hearty laughter 

n and within reason, and his scant reverence for 

total abstainers from it, on principle, or by a or a 

twist in their temperament, arc seen in p by the 

score. He might not go all the way with his mercurial 



412 STIFLED LA UGHTER. 

Gratiano when he elected to play the fool, and would 
have old wrinkles come with mirth and laughter ; but 
Shakspeare used Gratiano as his own mouthpiece when 
declaiming against 

" a sort of men whose visages 

Do cream and mantle, like a standing pond ; 
And do a wilful stillness entertain," 

for the sake of being reputed too grave for a passing 
chuckle, too wise for even a flitting smile. Portia, in 
the same play, declares she had rather be married to a 
death's head with a bone in his mouth, than to one of 
this sort, the County Palatine to wit, who " hears merry 
tales, and smiles not," and who is like to prove the 
weeping philosopher when he is old, so full of unman- 
nerly sadness in his youth. Cowper is didactic on the 
via media, the golden mean: 

" For tell some men that, pleasure all their bent, 
And laughter all their work, life is misspent, 
Their wisdom bursts into the sage reply, 
Then mirth is sin, and we should always cry. 
To find the medium asks some share of wit, 
And therefore 'tis a mark fools never hit." 

In Peter Damiani's black account of the sins which he 
had to struggle against, one is " disposition to laughter." 
Now, true religion, as interpreted by a later theologian, 
wages no abstract war against any part of man's nature, 
but gives to each its due subordination or supremacy, 
breathing sweetness and purity through all. A sober 
view of human life, he contends, will show that to " pro- 
scribe the jocose side of our nature would be a blunder 
as grievous in its way as to proscribe love between men 
and women." There are times and places when we 
cannot, as well as may not, laugh ; but it is by no means 
the highest state always to stifle laughter. That rather 
belongs, he argues, to the stiff precisian, who fears to 
betray something false within him, and habitually wears 



LEG IT IMA TE LAI 'GHTER. 4 1 3 

a mask, lest his heart be too deeply exposed ; while the 
true-hearted fearlessly yields to his impulse, and u no 
more wishes to hide it from the All-seeing eye, than a 
child would hide his childish sports from the eye of a 
father.''' Dr. O. W. Holmes satirizes, in Nux Postcacna- 
-he exacting stringency of some governing powers : 

" Besides — my prospects— don't you know that people won't employ 
A man that wrongs his manliness by laughing like a boy ? . . 

ig prospect, when you're screwing out a laugh, 
That your very next year's income is diminished by a half." 

To say that solemnity is an essential of greatness, that 
no great man can have other than a rigid vinegar aspect 
of countenance, never to be thawed or warmed by billows 
of mirth, Mr. Carlyle very explicitly declines. For his 
teaching is, that there are things in this world to be 
laughed at, as well as things to be admired ; and that 
his is no complete mind, that cannot give to each sort 
its due. It might be the Plea of other "good people " 
than the Midsummer Fairies: 

shrew those sad interpreters of nature, 
Who gloze her lively universal law, 

if she had not formed our cheerful feature 
To be so tickled with the slightest Stra 

eems more than half inclined to pronounce 
laughter wholly immoral. Half-immoral he does ex- 
plicitly and delib and emphatically term it: — 

M 1 though never censured \w 

:don a thought that only 
!f-immoral. Is it much indu! 

iting thou 
a scorner, or it mak 
And sins, a*> hurting others orourseh 

raw 
little minds to mirth eff 
: tcntous - 
The house of laughter makes a house of w 



4U PLEAS FOR LAUGHTER. 

Sombrius is Addison's name for one of those "sons 
of sorrow " who think themselves obliged in duty to be 
sad and disconsolate, and who look on a sudden fit of 
laughter as a breach of their baptismal vow, who sigh 
at the conclusion of a merry story, and grow devout 
when the rest of the company grow pleasant. If we 
may believe our logicians, pleads Mr. Spectator, man is 
distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of 
laughter. He has a heart capable of mirth, and natu- 
rally disposed to it ; and it is the business of virtue, not 
to extirpate the affections of the mind, but to regulate 
them ; it may moderate and restrain, but was not 
designed to banish gladness from the heart of man. "A 
man would neither choose to be a hermit nor a buffoon : 
human nature is not so miserable as that we should 
be always melancholy, nor so happy as that we should 
be always merry. " A crabbed crew is that depicted in 
Mr. LuttrelPs octosyllabics : 

" No smile is on their lips, no word 
Of cheerful sound among them heard, 
As if all virtue lay in gravity, 
And smiles were symptoms of depravity." 

Grave as might be Milton's elder manhood, in his youth 
at least he was the academical apologist of hearty 
laughter, " most abundant and free." He then at least 
could and would have echoed the French bard's J'aime 
le rire, — 

" Non le rire ironique aux sarcasmes moqueurs 
Mais le doux rire honnete ouvrant bouches et cceurs, 
Qui montre en meme temps des ames et des perles." 

It is of about the least estimable of all the character 
portraits in his noble gallery, that Scott tells us that 
" his laugh never exceeded a sarcastic smile." But the 
same sort of thing is told of many real people, good 
people too, and some of them even great. A smile is 



PEOPLE WHO NEVER LAUGH. 41$ 

said to have been the utmost that ever played over the 
lips of the " intensely melancholy " Plato ; he never 
laughed. (" As sad as Plato," became a phrase with 
the comic dramatists.) Phocion was never once by the 
Athenians seen to laugh (or, for the matter of that, to 
cry either;. Plutarch says of Cato, " Scarce anything 
could make him laugh ; and it was but rarely that his 
countenance was softened to a smile." Yet the same 
biographer incidentally mentions afterwards that Cato 

_d always to laugh when he told the story " of his 
reception at Antioch. Montesquieu, in the Persian 
Letters, makes L'sbek affirm the existence in Turkey 
of families where, from father to son, since the kingdom 
began, not a soul has ever laughed, pcrsoiuic n a ri. 

It is an old-world story of Crassus, the grandsirc of 
Marcus the wealthy Roman, that he never laughed but 
once in all his life, and that was at sight of an ass eating 
thistles. Julius Saturninus, son of the Emperor Philip the 
Arabian, is asserted never to have laughed at anything at 
all, — asinine or what not. It was said of Philip IV. of 

in, that he never in his life laughed out, except at the 
recital of the story of the Queen of Spain having no [( 

r Robert Walpole's successor as finance- 
minister, was said by Horace to have never laughed but 
once, and that was when his best friend broke his thigh. 
A Parliamentary prig from his cradle, perhaps, after the 
type of that Mr. Pynscnt whom Pendennis taxes with 
having never laughed since he was born, except three 

times at the same joke of his chief. Swedenborg was 

LUgh, though he is allowed to have always 
had .t cheerful smile on his countenance. Swift smiled 

seldom, laughed never. Madame de Motteville noted 
niumenty of Lewis the Fourteenth, that even " dans 

ses jeux et dans ses divertissements Ce prince ne riait 

guere." Fontenelle never laughed ; and being- inquir- 



4i 6 NEVER SEEN TO LAUGH. 

ingly told so by Madame Geoffrin, " No," was his reply, 
" I have never uttered an Ah ! ah ! ah ! " That was 
his idea of laughter : he could be moved to a faint smile 
indeed by choses fines, but was incapable of any lively 
feeling whatever. Sainte-Beuve remarks of him, that as 
he had never uttered an ah ! ah ! ah ! so neither had he 
an oh ! oh ! oh ! — that is to say, he had never admired. 
Nothing of the kind could be alleged of that predecessor 
and namesake of the Grand Monarque, the ninth of the 
name, and canonized a Saint ; or again of that yet 
earlier one, the Debonaire, who " never raised his voice 
in laughing, not even on occasions of public rejoicing," 
when jesters set and kept his table in a roar, "/fenot 
even smiling so as to show his white teeth.'''' La Roche- 
foucauld, in his Portrait fait par hd-meme, was no less 
scrupulous to avow himself melancholy, and never laugh- 
ing more than one laugh per annum, than Rousseau was 
to disavow a letter imputed to him which made him de- 
clare he had not laughed more than once or twice in his 
life ; the forgers of which epistle, he averred, could not 
have known him in his younger days, or such a notion 
would never have crossed their brain. Jean-Jacques had 
no ambition to be taken for the sort of man mine host of 
Ben Jonson's New Inn is keen to practise upon, if so be 
he can but " spring a smile upon this brow, 

" That, like the rugged Roman alderman, 
Old master Cross, surnamed 'AyeXaaros, 
Was never seen to laugh, but at an ass." 

Referring in one of his Spectators to what he calls 
" men of austere principles " who look upon mirth as too 
wanton and dissolute for a state of probation, and as 
filled with a certain triumph and insolence of heart, that 
is inconsistent with a life exposed at every moment to 
the greatest dangers, Addison cites the observation of 



NO LA UGH OX RECORD OF THE MAX OF SORROW ' 

writers of this complexion, " that the sacred person who 
was the great pattern of perfection was never seen to 
laugh."* The " conceit " is discussed, or rather touched 
upon in passing, by Sir Thomas Browne, in the seventh 
book of Vulgar Errors — a conceit "sometimes urged as 
a high example of gravity. And this is opinioned be- 
in Holy Scripture it is recorded He sometimes 
wept, but never that He laughed. Which, howsoever 
granted, it will be hard to conceive how He passed His 
youn. rs and childhood without a smile, if as 

divinity affirmeth, for the assurance of His humanity 
unto men, and the concealment of His divinity from the 
devil, he passed this age like other children, and so pro- 

d until He evidenced the same. And surely here- 
in no danger there is to affirm the act or performance of 
that, whereof we acknowledge the power and essential 
property ; and whereby indeed He most nearly con- 
vinced the doubt of His humanity." One of Sir Thomas 
Browne's commentators hereupon remarks that " the 
doubt of His humanity was convinced soe many other 

S (before His p that "the propertye of 

risibilitye (which is indeed the usuall instance of the 
schooled though it bee inseparable from the nature of 
man, and incommunicable to any other nature, yet itt 
infer the necessitye of the acte in every indi- 
viduall subject m of man." Jeremy Taylor, in his 

ExJu; the Imitation of the Life of Christ, while 

admitting that we never read "that Ji .,hed, and 

but once that He rejoiced in spirit," goes on I 
that the " <>ur natures cannot bear the 

perpetual grave deportment, without the 
inter\ freshment and free alacrity." In the same 



•"He would weep often, but never laugh." — Ludolphus, I'itd 

1. L 



4i 8 A TIME TO LAUGH. 

spirit the late Archdeacon Hare argued, that while, 
avowedly, we cannot follow too closely the Great 
Exemplar, we are not to cleave servilely to the out- 
ward form, but rather to endeavour that the principles 
of our actions may be the same which He manifested 
in His ; for as He did many things which we cannot 
do,— as He had a power and a wisdom which lie al- 
together beyond our reach, — so are there many things 
which beseem us in our human, earthly relations, but 
which it did not enter into His purpose to sanction by 
His express example. " Else on the selfsame grounds 
it might be contended, that it does not befit a Christian 
to be a husband or a father, seeing that Jesus has set us 
no example of these two sacred relations." A later com- 
mentator holds it to be as certain that the Man of Sor- 
rows smiled at the gambols of a child, and shared the 
joy of the good, as that He sat at a wedding feast, and 
turned water into wine, and entered the house of joy as 
well as that of mourning. Man, on the same authority, 
is a laughing animal; superior to the "lower" animals 
in this, if in nothing else ; and to be ashamed of laughter, 
to hold back genuine mirth, is pronounced unworthy of 
the good, brave man who loves sunshine, and the lark's 
song, and the open breezy day, and dares to enjoy the 
happy thoughts which his Creator has, by assumption, 
put into his heart, to enliven and to better it. 

Rigid repressers and reprovers of laughter, as in itself 
a thing to be rigorously and vigorously, at all seasons 
and for all reasons, reproved and repressed, would seem 
to have based their system on a literal and exclusive 
reading of the once-uttered woe, " Woe unto you that 
laugh now ! for ye shall mourn and weep." Equally 
they would seem to have never read, or else to have clean 
forgotten, the benediction that by only a few verses pre- 



A TIME TO HATE. 419 

cedes that woe : " Blessed are ye that weep now, for ye 
shall laugh." He that pronounced the blessing, recog- 
nised therefore a time to laugh; and recognised it as 
the good time coming, all in good time to come. 



XXXVIII. 
A TIME TO HATE. 

ECCLESIASTES iii. S. 

SO comprehensive is the range of the Preacher's 
doctrine, that to even-thing there is a season, 
and a time to every purpose under the sun, that he 
explicitly includes hate in the category — hateful a 
thing though unqualified hate may be. There is "a 
time to hate" Take hate in a malignant sense, or as 
the evil outcome of an unchastened nature, of unre- 
strained impulse, of unbridled passion ; and then the 
time for it can scarcely be too short. We should in 
that ca 5 it with the permissible anger, upon 

which it is not permissible to let the sun go down. 
The hate that is hateful absolutely, has no part or 
in the matter of times and seasons to be sanc- 
tion my Preacher. He that hateth his brother, 
lid by the Apostle of love to be in darkness, walk- 
ing in it, and not knowing whither he goeth, SO en- 
tirely hath d blinded his eyes. Nay, "Whoso- 
r hateth his brother is a murderer." And, "If a man 
I, and hateth his brother, he is a liar." 

Hateful, and hating one another, is another Apostle's 
Char deeply fallen natures. But the 

himself expres 1 that we love 

not th world, neither the things that are in the world, 
and of the world, worldly; and by loving not, he im- 



4'2o WELL-DIRECTED HATE. 

plies what is a Scripture synonym for hate ; hate and 
love being often used as different degrees of one feeling 
— as when to hate father and mother for Christ's sake, 
means to love them less in comparison. But the legiti- 
mate action of well-directed hate is amply recognised 
and largely asserted in holy writ. There is a time to 
hate, because there are things to hate ; and to be a 
good hater in that sense is but to be, so far, a good 
man. The Church of Ephesus had this meed of praise 
from Him that spake as Alpha and Omega, the first 
and the last, " that thou hatest the deeds of the Nico- 
laitanes, which I also hate." The saintsad dressed by 
Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James, 
are prompted to hate even the garment spotted by the 
flesh. " The Lord, the God of Israel, saith [by Mala- 
chi], that He hateth putting away" (a wife without due 
cause). His only Son was anointed with the oil of 
gladness above His fellows, because He had loved right- 
eousness and hated iniquity. " Thou hatest all workers 
of iniquity," the Psalmist says in his prayer and medita- 
tion. "The wicked and him that loveth violence, His 
soul hateth." These six things doth the Lord hate, as 
we read in the Book of Proverbs ; " yea, seven are an 
abomination unto Him : a proud look, a lying tongue, 
hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that deviseth 
wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to 
mischief, a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that 
soweth discord among brethren." The fear of the Lord 
is to hate evil ; and the testimony of Wisdom imper- 
sonated is, that "pride, and arrogancy, and the evil 
way, and the froward mouth, do I hate." It is for the 
man after God's own heart to say, " I have hated the 
congregation of evil-doers." Evil-doing in all its phases 
is worthy of hate ; it is good to be a good hater of it, 
and the better the hate the better the man. 



A GOOD HATER. 421 

The Good Hater, simply as such, is rather a favourite 
with discerning spirits : 

"Rough Johnson, the great moralist, professed, 
Right honestly, 'he liked an honest hater'" — 

and this, Byron calls 

•• The only truth that yet has been confessed, 
Within the latest thousand years or later." 

Byron's journal and letters contain evidence of his 
sympathy with Johnson's avowed predilection. For 
instance, of Junius he says in his diary, "I like him; — 
he was a good hater." 

Lord Lytton has indited a lament over the good 
old days when plain speaking and hard blows were in 
fashion — when a man had his heart at the tip of his 
tongue, and four feet of sharp iron dangling at his side, 
and when Hate played an honest open part in the 
theatre of the world. But now where is Hate ? he 
asks — who ever sees its face ? Is it that smiling, good- 
tempered creature, that presses you by the hand so 
cordially ? or that dignified figure of state that calls 
you its "Right Honourable Friend"? And he sug- 
that as, in the Gothic age, grim Humour painted 
the " Dance of Death/' so, in otir polished century, 
some sardonic wit should give us the " Masquerade of 
deep in the foundations of our nature the 
instinct lie-, and how strongly as well as deeply rooted, 
let Mr. Browning's Paracelsus attest : 

" I »'). tagea have discovered WC are born 

For various ends to Love, to know: has ever 

mbled, in his search, on any sij 

1 M a nature in him formed to ha; >te? 

If that be our true object win. 

Our power-, in fullest Strength, be sur ■ 'tlS hate '/' 

Here and there, it is true, one lights OH a nature such 
as Sir James Mackintosh's, of whom Sydney Smith 



422 KNOWING HOW TO HATE. 

made it a special characteristic that he was devoid of 
hate — as well as of envy, malice, and all uncharitable- 
ness ; asserting that he could not hate — did not know 
how to set about it ; that the gall-bladder was omitted 
in his composition ; and that if he could have been per- 
suaded into any scheme of revenging himself upon an 
enemy, he assuredly would (unless narrowly watched) 
have ended, like the involuntary seer of old, in blessing 
him altogether. 

Notions vary of what a good hater is, or should be. 
The Earl of Chesterfield complains that few (especially 
young) people know how to hate, any more than how to 
love ; their love, he says, is an unbounded weakness, 
fatal to the object of it ; while their hate is a hot, rash, 
and imprudent violence, always fatal to themselves. 
Slight sympathy could his serene lordship ever have 
felt with what Moliere's Alceste justifies as 

" ces haines vigoureuses 

Que doit donner le vice aux ames vertueuses." 

To hate an oppressor is maintained by Mr. Buckle to 
be an instinct of our nature, against which he who 
struggles does so to his own detriment. For although 
we may abhor a speculative principle, and yet respect 
him who advocates it, this distinction is confined to the 
intellectual world, and does not extend to the practi- 
cal. Such a separation cannot, for instance, " extend to 
deeds of -cruelty. In such cases, our passions instruct 
our understanding. The same cause which excites our 
sympathy for the oppressed, stirs up our hatred of the 
oppressor." And this instinct is declared to belong to 
the higher region of the mind, and not to be impeached 
by argument, not capable even of being touched by it. 
Some such feeling may be assumed in palliation of the 
vindictive outburst of Edward Bruce, in Scott's poem, 



INTENSITY OF MUTUAL HATE. 42; 

when exulting over the death of his namesake, king o: 
England : 

" Eternal as his own, my hate 
Surmounts the bounds of mortal fate, 

And dies not with the dead ! 
Such hate was his on Solway's strand, 
When vengeance clenched his palsied hand, 
That pointed yet to Scotland's land, 

As his last accents prayed 
Disgrace and curse upon his heir, 
If he one Scottish head should spare, 
Till stretched upon the bloody lair 

Each rebel corpse was laid. 
Such hate was his, when his last breath 
Renounced the peaceful house of death, 
And bade his bones to Scotland's coast 
Be borne by his remorseless host, 
As if his dead and stony eye 
Could still enjoy her misery. 
Such hate was his — dark, deadly, long ; 
Mine, — as enduring, deep, and strong !" 

The very definition of a patriot, according to Hazlitt, 
is "a good hater;" a good-natured man being, on his 
showing, no more fit to be trusted in public affairs tlian 
a coward or a woman is to lead an army. Spleen he 

res to be the soul of patriotism and of public 
good. And of spleen, Hazlitt himself had enough and 

ire — The intensity of mutual hate has been called 
the leading characteristic of the whole course of Italian 

y, furnishing the master-key to its intricacies ; 

te hatred between man and man; class hatred be- 
tween family and family; party hatred between Jilacks 
and Whil [S and Shorts, or any other dis- 

tinctiv ins ; political hatred between patricians 

and plet* <cal hatred between citizens and " ru.v 

wliile municipal hatred between one city and 

red to have ever been in Italy the 

master passion ) vigorous in its action and notable in 



424 . GERMAN VIGOUR OF HATE. 

its results in proportion to the vigour of social life ani- 
mating the body of the nation. Heine claims for the 
Germans, however, a proud pre-eminence in the power 
of intensely hating: "Les Allemands sont plus rancuniers 
que les peuples d'origine romane." They are idealists, 
he asserts, even in their hate ; and what they hate in 
an enemy is la pensee. He told the French they were 
quick and superficial in hatred, as in love ; while nous 
autres Allemands cherish a radical detestation, and 
hold on to it to the very last. "Nous nous haissons 
jusqu'au dernier soupir." Luther was a representative 
man of his race, in the intellectual hatred he so im- 
placably avowed against Erasmus. " I pray you all 
to vow enmity to Erasmus," was a Trinity Sunday 
exhortation of his to all and sundry his friends ; and 
to Doctors Jonas and Pomeranus in particular he be- 
quested this injunction, expressed with manifestly heart- 
felt emphasis : " I recommend it to you as my last will, 
to be terrible and unflinching towards that serpent. — 
If I myself am restored to health, by God's help I will 
write against him and kill him." For a German of the 
Germans, constitutionally so "sweet blooded" (in Jef- 
frey's pet phrase) as Martin Luther, the power of hating 
he displayed was what across the Atlantic might be 
termed a caution. 

Natures may be so sweet-blooded, or so cold-blooded, 
as to be wanting in the elementary materials that go to 
make up a good hater. Macaulay says of Bacon, that he 
was by no means a good hater ; that the temperature of 
his revenge, like that of his gratitude, was scarcely even 
more than lukewarm. When of Macaulay himself, by 
the way, on the occasion of his death, some press critic 
asserted that he "had no heart," how warmly Mr. 
Thackeray denied that negation, and declared the heart 
of the brilliant historian to be sensibly beating through 



GOOD HATERS. 



every page he penned — so that he seemed to be always 
in a storm of revolt and indignation against wrong, craft, 
tyranny. " How he hates scoundrels, ever so victorious 
and successful ! . . . The critic who says Macaulay 
had no heart, might say that Johnson had none ; and 
two men more generous, and more loving, and more 
hating, and more partial, and more noble, do not live in 
our history." Rousseau more than once declares of him- 
self that he knew not how to hate ; that he could despise 
his enemies heartily and freely, but as to hating them — 
that he knew not how to set about it. One would 
scarcely have inferred any such absolute impotency, 
from a study of the opera omnia of Jean-Jacques — some 
of which rather indicate an ample secretion of gall, such 
as a very good hater indeed might find quite enough 
for all practical purposes. The Abbe de Choisy is 
another of those spirituel Frenchmen who have claimed 
to be innocent of the faculty of hate. He is sans ran- 
CUHe t he protests, and is without an enemy in the world, 
and without the power of making one. His nature 
"cherchait vainement en elle la force de hair.'''' Sainte- 
Beuve defines him accordingly as in all respects the 
opposite of Alceste and of M. de Montausier. So is he 
of such a man as Guy Patin, with his almost Rabelaisian 
s de parole against those devoted objects of his 
detestation, — monks, Jesuits, and apothecaries. War to 
the knife against these, — war to the death, was Guy 
Patin's principle and his practice. 

iert Dudley, Marl of Leicester, — the sweet Robin 
of Queen Bess, has tin's said of him by an author who 

is prompt b nize his good qualities, that no man 

r made SO many enemies: "He was an excellent 

hater, and few men have been more cordially hated in 
return." Mr. Motley describes the imperious, insolent, 
hot-tempered earl, during his career in the Netherlands, 



426 GOOD HATERS: LEICESTER, BOLINGBROKE, 

as mortally offending Hohenlo, Buys, Barneveld, and 
others, while the English representative, Wilkes, was 
a special object of his aversion ; and as for Sir John 
Norris, him the Earl hated with a most passionate 
hatred. Of course when Hohenlo and Sir John Norris 
became very good friends, the enmity between them and 
Leicester grew more deadly every day. The Earl was 
" frantic with rage " against them, denouncing Norris as 
" a fool, liar, and coward " on all occasions, besides over- 
whelming every one who took his part with a torrent 
of abuse ; and it is well known, the historian of the 
United Provinces remarks, that the Earl was a master 
of Billingsgate. 

It is in reference to " accomplished St. John " that the 
late Lord Lytton once said, that we cannot blame poli- 
ticians for their hatred, until,, without hating anybody, 
we have for a long time been politicians ourselves : 
" Strong minds have strong passions, and men of strong 
passions must hate as well as love." Bolingbroke's 
antipathy to Harley is said by one of his biographers 
to have been so strong, that even success would have 
been hateful to him, if Lord Oxford were to share in it. 
" He abhorred him to that degree, that he could not 
bear to be joined with him in any case ; and even some 
time after, when the lives of both were aimed at, he 
could not think of concerting measures with him for 
their mutual safety, preferring even death itself to the 
appearance of a temporary friendship." And these were 
the two men between whom Swift had to play Mr. 
Harmony,— Dr. Jonathan being himself one of the very 
best of good haters. So was Pope — though he could 
occasionally simulate, perhaps, a much deeper aversion 
than he actually felt. De Quincey at least charges him 
with adopting malice at second-hand, in the case of the 
Duchess of Marlborough (his Atossa) ; remarking that 



POPE, DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH. 427 

more shocking than the malice is the self-imposture of 
the malice ; and accusing Pope of being really unmoved, 
or angry only by favour of dyspepsy, while in the very 
act of puffing out his cheeks, like ./Eolus, with ebullient 
fury, and conceiting himself to be in a passion perfectly 
diabolic. Of Duchess Sarah, on the other hand, the 
same critic affirms, not without explicit admiration, that 
sulphureous vapours of wrath rose up in columns from 
the crater of her tempestuous nature against him that 
deeply offended her, while she neglected petty wrongs. 
With quite other colours is her portrait painted by 
Macaulay, who, contrasting her with her husband, "one 
of the most covetous, but one of the least acrimonious 
of mankind," says that malignity was in her a stronger 
passion than avarice ; that she hated easily, hated heart- 
ily, and hated implacably ; among the objects of her 
hatred being all who were related to her royal mistress 
on either the paternal or the maternal side. Elsewhere 
the historian speaks of the Duchess of Marlborough as 
carrying to her grave the reputation of being decidedly 
the best hater of her time — though he is careful to add, 
that her love had been infinitely more destructive than 
her hatred. She was eminently capable of one of those 
concentrated hatreds of which, according to M. About, 
only women arc capable. In Madame, Mere du Regent 
d'Orlcans, has been recognized a degree of antipathy to 
Madame de Maintenon, almost inconceivable in its ex- 
Cess "de haine, d'animosit£, et si violent que cela devient 
comique." Mr. Trollope incidentally observes, that for 
a true spirit of persecution, one should always go to a 

Oian ; and that the milder, the sweeter, the more 

womanly the woman, the stronger will be that spirit 

within her. "Strong love for the thing Loved necessi- 
tate hatred for the thing hated ; and thence 

Conies the spirit of persecution." M. .Ampere makes 



428 GOOD HATERS AND BAD. 

Sylla a laggard in his knowledge of the sex when he 
puts the note of interrogation to one of them]: " Tu sais 
done, comme moi, bien hair ? " " Je suis femme," is the 
only and all-sufficient reply to such a query as that. 

Commend us to Horace Walpole as one of the fullest- 
grown specimens extant of a good hater. And there 
was such a wonderful breadth in his animosity, as the 
critics have observed ; for he displays equal, or nearly 
equal bitterness towards men of all parties. Invited by 
Sir Horace Mann to share in his friend's detestation of 
Cardinal Acquaviva, " I can't afford to hate people so 
much at such a distance," writes Walpole : " my aver- 
sions find employment within their own atmosphere." 
Nor were they ever idle within that range — which, how- 
ever, for all his professions to the contrary, they often 
enough overpassed. Some of his own family were the 
objects of his exceeding hate ; but if his lack of charity 
began at home, it did not end there. His "monster" 
of an uncle, Horace, "lowest of buffoons," — his cousin, 
" Pigwiggin," a shade more odious still, — Lord Holland, 
the Yorkes, the King ; while ever and anon there comes 
in the Letters such a passage as this : " I used to say to 
myself, ' Lord, this person is so bad, that person is so 
bad, I hate them.' I have now found out that they are 
all pretty much alike, and I hate nobody." 

Dr. Currie claims for Burns a capacity hardly inferior 
to Johnson's own, for hearty hating, "as long as the 
disposition to ill-will continued ; but the fervour of his 
passions was fortunately tempered by their versatility." 
The designation of a good hater would probably be 
denied by the orthodox to one of shifty temperament, 
who could forego an enmity with change of wind, or 
fortune, or place — and could not hate on, and on, and 
still on, without variableness and beyond conciliation. 
Of Cobbett, in 1817, Miss Mitford writes: "He was 



CHERISHED HATE. 429 

always what Dr. Johnson would have called a very 
pretty hater ; but since his release from Newgate he 
has been hatred itself — a very abstract and personifica- 
tion of misanthropy, which, for more grace, he has 
christened Patriotism." Goethe, who professed to hate 
everything Oriental (" Eigentlich aber hasse ich alles 
Orientalische "), said he was glad there was something 
he hated ; for otherwise one is in danger of falling into 
the dull habit of literally finding all things good in their 
place, — and that, said he, is destructive of all true feel- 
ing. He makes his Tasso protest that he must and 
will go on hating Antonio, whether mistaken about the 
man or not : 

'• And if I err, I err with right good will. 
I count him for my most inveterate foe, 
And should be inconsolable, were I 
Compelled to think of him more leniently. 
Man's nature, in its narrow scope, demands 
The f.vofuld sentiment of love and hate. - ' 

Certain characters are known to exist, and those not 

OS the worst, to whom the indulgence o( a 

good hot hatred is as refreshing and delightful as the 

luxury of love to others. An essayist on Hatred shows 

how this is intelligible ; love and hatred being on the 
ie line of late emotion, the only difference with 

them is, that the habitual emotion which constitutes 
their life lies nearer to the pole of hatred ; so that, but 
f.r the fear of a paradox, one might almost say that 
hatred is, in fact, the form love takes in them. " It i> 
their form of passionate care and attention. Instead of 

the slow and agonizing simmer of love, theirs is the 
slow, and to them delicious, simmer of hatred." l"n- 
qu< y there are men to whom a good hatred is 

nial, — it is to them a perpetual source of 
life, and a fillip to the full f overflowing exist- 



43o GOOD HATERS : BURKE, FRANCIS, THURLOW, 

ence. " Love, even the most passionate love, is proba- 
bly not to be compared for intensity of sensation with 
a full-blown hatred." As poison is the life of certain 
plants, so is hatred said to be the life of certain natures. 
Theirs is a tenderly-cherished aversion ; and it would, 
to critical observers of them, almost seem as if this form 
of hatred were in the nature of the intensest occupation 
vouchsafed to mankind.. 

Describing the life of every devout Spaniard of old 
as a perpetual crusade, the historian of Latin Chris- 
tianity remarks that hatred of the Jew, of the Moham- 
medan, was the herrban under which he served — it was 
the oath of his chivalry; and that hatred, in all its in- 
tensity, was soon and easily extended to the heretic. 
To be a good hater of all these, — how else could the 
Spaniard be a good man ? 

In no one, says Mr. Bagehot, has the intense faculty 
of intellectual hatred — the hatred which the absolute 
dogmatist has for those in whom he incarnates and 
personifies the opposing dogma — been fiercer or 
stronger than in Burke. Of Sir Philip Francis, Macau- 
lay observes that his hatred was of intense bitterness 
and long duration. And, mistaking his malevolence 
for virtue, he " nursed it, as preachers tell us we ought 
to nurse our good dispositions, and paraded it on all 
occasions, with Pharisaical ostentation." 

Lord Brougham would make out George III. to 
have been a good hater, especially of his eldest 
son, "whom he hated with a hatred scarcely consist- 
ent with a sound mind." And on the same autho- 
rity Lord Thurlow belongs to the same category — 
the first and foremost object of his hate being " Mr. 
Pitt, whom he hated with a hatred as hearty as even 
Lord Thurlow could feel," though in this case com- 
mingling his dislike with a scorn which his Whig sue- 



VOSS, JOSEPH WOLFF, VEUILLOT. 431 

cessor on the woolsack pronounces wholly unbecoming 
and misapplied. 

Sometimes a good hater crops up from the unlikeliest 
soil. That seemingly very mild old gentleman, Voss, 
who wrote the sentimental idyl called " Luise/ J fairly 
startled his old acquaintance Frederick Perthes by the 
abrupt energy with which, at the mention of Fouque's 
name, he turned from serene discourse and " patriarchal 
Luisis)ns about God's beautiful nature, and flowers, and 
plants, and old times, and simple-hearted men," to a 
strain of invective against Fouque and all his works that 
" really terrified " the listener. Furiously too the old 
man went on to inveigh against Claudius, Stolberg, 
and others ; and after dinner, walking with his visitor 
in the garden, the patriarch ran over a string of names, 
more or less distinguished, adding to each some epithet, 
such as " scoundrel, mischief-making traitor, sneaking 
hound/' etc., etc., till Perthes could stand it no longer, 
but left the premises, and wrote home that there reigned 
in that apparent home of tranquil joy and wisdom, "a 
spirit of hatred that has surprised and deeply pained 
me." The venerable Voss reminds us in his style of 
the reverend Joseph Wolff, \).\)., who displayed his 
powers as a good hater by such accumulated phrases 

in hi of Travels and Adventures, as "filthy 

Calvinist," "some long-nosed snuff-taking lady of the 

so-called Evangelical party," "a Long-face-pulling lady 

with a whining voice," " nasty Atheist and infidel," 

and the like ; while, religion apart — and certainly the 

odium theologicum can match an)- other in its intensity 

he never, it has been remarked, mentions a certain 

hman, with whom he travelled in Mesopotamia, 

•n the scoundrel." What a good hater, 

again, was put to silence when the Univers was 

"warned'' by the French Government, and AI. Veuillot 



432 DEFECTIVE POWER OF HATE. 

checked in his rhapsodies of invective. Englishmen 
declared his hatred of England to be quite respectable 
from its intensity. " M. Veuillot was a good hater, 
and good haters are by no means the worst of their 
species." Dr. Arnold, in his cordial way, hating as well 
as loving with a will, is taxed by De Quincey with 
hating the High Church with a hatred more than theo- 
logical ; while, as regards the Low Church, though not 
hating them, he is represented as despising them so 
profoundly as to make any alliance between him and 
them impossible. 

Shrewd observers tell us that the incapacity for 
hatred is generally the result of a defect rather than a 
positive virtue. The people who hate nobody are 
likened, most of them, to Pope's women — 

" Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear, 
And best distinguished by black, brown, or fair.'" 

They are denned to be of the passionless and insipid 

order, who do not hate simply because they have not 

the strength of character to entertain any very strong 

or decided passion. And, therefore, taking men as 

they are and not as they ought to be, we are said to 

be rather pleased than otherwise by discovering that a 

man has good, hearty, unreasonable hatred for some 

of his neighbours, because it proves at least that he 

has strong emotions, and is something better than one 

of the ciphers of society. It may be clear that he does 

not belong to the highest, but it is also clear that he 

does not belong to the lowest and most numerous class 

of human beings, and therefore the net result of the 

discovery is decidedly in his favour. " It proves that 

he is above the average of humanity." The Prince de 

Conti — Saint Simon's de Conti ; and what a good hater 

Saint Simon was ! — is thus appraised, on his feeble side, 

by the Marquis de Lassay : " II ne sait ni bien aimer, 



AFFINITY OF HATE AXD LOVE. 433 

ni bien hair." A later French writer objects to the 
common remark, a fallacy he considers it to be, that 
those who can hate well can therefore love well — as if 
these two sentiments had the same origin. Whereas, 
by his scheme of psychology, affection proceeds from 
the heart, and hatred from irritated amour-propre or 
wounded self-interest. 

In one of Hawthorne's phantasy-pieces, as the 
Germans would call them, which is devoted to the 
chippings of a chisel from gravestones and monumental 
tablets, we come across an elderly man, of harsh aspect, 
who orders a stone for the grave of his bitter enemy, 
his adversary in the warfare of half a lifetime, to their 
mutual misery and ruin. The secret of this procedure 
is explained to have been, that hatred had become the 
:ance and enjoyment of the poor wretch's soul ; it 
had supplied the place of all kindly affections ; it had 
been really a bond of sympathy between himself and 
the man who shared the passion; and when its object 
died, the unappeasable foe was the only mourner for 
the dead. He expressed a purpose of being buried 
side by side with his enemy. " I doubt whether their 
dust will mingle," said the old sculptor. But our more 
subtle author, who had mused long upon the incident, 
replied, " Oh, yes ; and when they rise again, these 
bitter foes may find themselves dear friends. Methinks 
what they mistook for hatred was but love under a 
It" 

It is a curious subject of speculation with Nathaniel 
Hawthorne, in another work, whether hatred and love 
me thing at bottom ; each, in its utmost 
. high degree of intimacy and 
; each rendering one individual depen- 
dent for the food of hi.^ affections and spiritual life upon 
another ; and each leaving the passionate lover, or the 

l r 



434 ' THE ABUNDANCE OF THE RICH 

no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the 
withdrawal of his subject. Philosophically considered, 
therefore, the author of "Transformation" takes the 
two passions to be essentially the same, only one hap- 
pens to be seen in a celestial radiance, and the other 
in a dusky and lurid glow. Mr. Browning moots the 
general question from another point of view when he 
speaks of 

" Dante, who loved well because lie hated, 
Hated wickedness that hinders loving." 



-o — — 



XXXIX. 
FAST-ASLEEP TOIL AND WIDE-A WAKE CARE. 

ECCLESIASTES V. 12. 

IT is written among the words of the Preacher, the son 
of David, king of Jerusalem, that " the sleep of a 
labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much ; 
but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to 
sleep." "Yea, his heart taketh not rest in the night. 
This is also vanity." The cares of this life, and the de- 
ceitfulness of riches, make him full of tossings to and 
fro unto the dawning of the day. 

La Fontaine's fable of the Financier and the Cobbler 
might have been written on purpose to illustrate the 
proverb now our text. The financier, careful and 
troubled about many things financial, and cumbered 
with much service of mammon, finds what little rest he 
otherwise might get, disturbed, diminished, and reduced 
to its lowest terms by the lusty voice of his light-hearted 
neighbour the cobbler, who sings away at sunrise, after 
a sound night's rest, and now up in the morning early 
to a hard day's work. Dives thinks it remiss of Provi- 
dence not to have made sound sleep a purchasable 



WILL NOT SUFFER HIM TO SLEEP: 435 

commodity, to be quoted on 'change. However, he 
summons the cobbler to his presence, and questions him 
as to the amount of his daily gains by cobbling ; is 
amused by his vivacity ; and astounds him by a gift of 
a hundred crowns. The cobbler thinks himself possessor 
of, surely, all the money there is in the wide world ; 
takes it home, buries it in a hole, and with it buries his 
gladheartedness. For now he is the victim of care ; 
anxious misgivings beset him as to the safety of his 

ire ; he sings no more ; he is unable to sleep ; if 
some cat make a noise by night, the cat is making oft" 
with his hard cash. So at last the poor man hies him 
to the rich one, whose slumbers he had now ceased to 
disturb, and demands to have back his songs and his 
sleep, in return for the hundred crowns he is heartily 
glad to get rid of on such terms. So with De Foe's 
Colonel Jack, when, as a lad, he receives a handful of 
gold from an elder accomplice in theft, and finds himself 
hopelessly embarrassed to know what to do with the 
prize. " Nothing could be more perplexing to me than 
this money was all night." After a variety of graphic 
details, he continues : " Well, I carried it home with me 
to my lodging in the glass-house, and when I went to 
sleep, I knew not what to do with it, . . . so I lay 
with it in my hand, and my hand in my bosom, but 

sleep went from my eyes. Oh, the weight of human 
care ! I, a poor beggar-boy, could not sleep as soon as 
I had a little money to keep, who, before that, could 

slept upon a heap of brickbats, stones, or cinders, 
as sound as a rich man does in his down bed, and 
sounder t 

• re the little door that Spenser's FJfin-knight found 
to be next adjoining to the gate of hell — for betwixt 
them both was but a little stride, that did the House of 
Richesse from Hell-mouth divide, — 



436 FAST-ASLEEP TOIL, WIDE-AWAKE WEALTH. 

" Before the dore sate selfe-consuming Care, 

Day and night keeping wary watch and ward, 

For feare lest Force or Fraude should unaware 
Breake in, and spoile the treasure there in gard : 

Ne would he suffer Sleepe once thitherward 
Approch." 

In Churchill's Gotham we see the villager, born 
humbly and bred hard, Content his wealth, and Poverty 
his guard, after short commons with his "raw-boned 
cubs " on clean, coarse food, betake him to rest, and safe 
to find it : 

" T%n, free from care, and free from thought, he creeps 
Into his straw, and till the morning sleeps. 
— Not so the king ; with anxious cares oppressed 
His bosom labours, and admits not rest. 
# * # When Night bids sleep, 
Sweet nurse of nature, o'er the senses creep ; 
When Misery herself no more complains, 
And slaves, if possible, forget their chains ; 
Though his sense weakens, though his eyes grow dim, 
The rest which comes to all, comes not to him. 
E'en at that hour, Care, tyrant Care, forbids 
The dew of sleep to fall upon his lids ; 
From night to night she watches at his bed ; 
Now, as one moped, sits brooding o'er his head ; 
Anon she starts, and, borne on raven's wings, 
Croaks forth aloud — 'Sleep was not made for kings.' " 

A similar contrast is drawn in the same writer's Duellist, 
in the first book of which we see how, while 

" Jealousy, his quick eye half-closed, 
With watchings worn, reluctant dozed ; 
And, mean Distrust not quite forgot, 
Slumbered as if he slumbered not ; 
Stretched at his length on the bare ground, 
His hardy offspring sleeping round, 
Snored restless Labour," — 

why called restless, is open to conjecture. Don Quixote, 
summoning at daybreak his somnolent squire, and find- 
ing him still snoring, apostrophizes Sancho as happy in 



THE SERVANT SLEEPS, THE MASTER WAKES. 437 

the extreme, because, neither envying nor envied, he can 
take his needful rest with tranquillity of soul. " Sleep 
on — a hundred times I say, sleep on ! No jealousies 
keep thee in perpetual watchings, nor do anxious 
thoughts of debts unpaid awake thee. . . . Ambition 
disquiets thee not, nor does the vain pomp of the world 
disturb thee : for thy chief concern is the care of thine 
. . . The servant sleeps, and the master lies 
ike." It is in one of the latest chapters in the same 
long history that we read of Sancho never wanting a 
•), for the first lasted him from night till 
morning, "indicating a sound body and mind free from 
care. But his master, being unable to sleep himself, 
awakened him, saying, ' I am amazed, Sancho, at the 
torpor of thy soul ; it seems as if thou wcrt made of 
marble or brass, insensible of emotion or sentiment/ M 
etc. One of the Don's eloquent outbursts of upbraidal 
winds up with a bit of Latin, and Sancho rejoins, " I 
know not what that means ; I only know that while I 
am asleep I have neither fear nor hope, nor trouble nor 
glory. Blessings light on him who first invented sleep ! 
— it covers a man all over, body and mind, like a cloak ; 
and it is meat to the hungry, and drink to the thirsty.'" 
The sleep of that serving-man was sweet, whether he 
ate little or much ; though he certainly preferred eating 
much, and lost no fair chance of doing so. 

One of the extant songs of the Elizabethan dramatist, 

rt Greene, begins, — 

thoughts that savour of content ; 
The quiet mind is richer than a crown ; 
Sw< nights in careless slumber Sp 

The poor estate scorns fortune's angry frown : 

.:, such minds, such sleep, such bliss, 
■ njoy, when princes oft do m: . 

Scott dismisses his Dame Jellycot and Phoebe to sleep 



438 FAST-ASLEEP TOIL, WIDE-AWAKE CARE, 

on a mattress stuffed with dry leaves, " soundly as those 
whose daily toil gains their daily bread, and whom 
morning calls up only to renew the toils of yesterday." 
Soundly as Bloomfield's Farmer's Boy : 

" Delicious sleep ! From sleep who could forbear, 
With no more guilt than Giles, and no more care ? 
Peace o'er his slumbers waves her guardian wing, 
Nor Conscience once disturbs him with a sting. 
He wakes refreshed from every trivial pain, 
And takes his pole, and brushes round again." 

Mr. Disraeli asserts that there is no greater fallacy in 
the world than the common creed, that sweet sleep is 
labour's guerdon : mere regular, corporeal labour may 
certainly, he admits, procure us a good, sound, refreshing 
slumber, though disturbed often by the consciousness 
of the monotonous duties of the morrow ; but how sleep 
the other great labourers of this laborious world ? 
Where, he asks, is the sweet sleep of the politician ? 
" After hours of fatigue in his office, and hours of .ex- 
haustion in the House, he gains his pillow ; and a brief, 
feverish night, disturbed by the triumph of a cheer and 
the horrors of a reply." And then come the parallel 
queries, Where is the sweet sleep of the poet — of the 
artist — of the lawyer ? Where, indeed, of any human 
being to whom to-morrow brings its necessary duties ? 
" Sleep is the enemy of Care, and Care is the constant 
companion of regular labour, mental or bodily." The 
care of riches, saith Jesus the son of Sirach, driveth away 

sleep. 

" Now soundly sleeps the weary hind, 
Though lowly lies his head ; 
An easy lair the guiltless find 

Upon the hardest bed. 
The beggar, in his wretched haunt, 

May now a monarch be, 
Forget his woe, forget his want, 
For all can sleep but me," — 



THE HIXD SNORING UPOX THE EL/XT. 439 

is Conrad's plaint in an unread poem. The YVeiss- 
nichtwo philosopher qualifies his lament for the poor 
by the reflection that for him, heavy-laden and weary, 
the Heavens send sleep, and of the deepest : "in his 
smoky cribs, a clear dewy heaven of Rest envelops him, 
and fitful glitterings of cloud-skirted Dreams." Shak- 
speare's saying, that 

" Weariness 

Can snore upon the flint, when restive Sloth 

Finds the down pillow hard," 

moves a genial, not a dry-as-dust, commentator to the 
.ark, that sleeping on hard stone would have been 
words strong enough for a common poet ; or perhaps 
the latter would have said " resting," or "profoundly re- 
posing," or that the hind could have made his " bed of 
the bare floor ; " but Shakspeare must have the very 
strongest words and really profoundest expressions, and 
finds them in the homeliest and most primitive : he 
does not mince the matter, but goes to the root of both 
sleep and stone — u can snore upon the flint." We see 
the fellow hard at it — bent upon it — deeply drinking 
of the forgetful draught. So Mr. Carlyle pictures his 
night-leaguers of San .Martin, lullabied by hard travail, 
all sinking soon enough into "steady nose-melody, into 
the foolishest rough colt-dance of unimaginable Dreams " 
— '• all steadily snoring there, in the heart of the Andes, 
under the eternal stars M — " all snoring steadily, begirt 
by granite deserts, Looked upon by the constellations 
in that manner." As Shakspeare's Henry the Fourth 
itle sleep, nature 1 nurse, with for- 

saking him, and with willing rather to lie in smoky 
cribs, upon ty, with the vile on loath- 

some beds, than in the perfumed chambers of the great, 
under the canopies :e, and lulled by sounds 

of tf melody; so his Harry the Fifth avows that 



44° PRINCE'S ENVY OF PEASANTS SLUMBER. 

'tis not the balm, the sceptre, and the ball, the sword, 
the mace, the crown imperial, the robe of gold and pearl, 
the title of the king, 

" The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp 
That beats upon the high shore of this world, 
No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony, 
Not all these, laid in bed majestical, 
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave, 
Who, with a body filled, and vacant mind, 
Gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread ; 
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell ; 
But, like a lackey, from the rise to set, 
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night 
Sleeps in Elysium." 

Readily would the speaker echo his father's conclusion 
of happy the lowly clown — or happy low lie down ; 
whichever be, or whatever else, the true reading — for, un- 
easy lies the head that wears a crown. So again with 
the sixth Henry, envying the shepherd's life, his homely 
curds even, his cold thin drink out of his leather bottle, 

" His wonted sleep under a fresh tree's shade, 
All which secure and sweetly he enjoys, 
Is far beyond a prince's delicates, 
His viands sparkling in a golden cup, 
His body couched in a curious bed, 
When care, mistrust, and treason wait on him." 

Otium is a thing, on Horatian authority, non gemtnis, 
neque purpura venale, nee auro. Happy the poor man 
from whom " Nee leves somnos timor aut cupido Sor- 
didus aufert.-" Come hither, is Cowper's summons to 
those who press their beds of down and sleep not : 
watch the thresher at his task, as thump after thump 
resounds the constant flail ; 

" See him sweating o'er his bread 
Before he eats it.— ; Tis the primal curse, 
But softened into mercy ; made the pledge 
Of cheerful days, and nights without a groan." 



THE SLEEP THAT STEEPS THE SEXSES. 441 

Why do we murmur ? is the remonstrance of a cheery 

spirit in one of Barry Cornwall's dramatic fragments : 

we poor ? What's that ? Tis but to breathe the 

air of industry ; to use sweet exercise from morn till 

—earn health, content, rude strength, and appetite ; 

i, when night draws her curtains round us, sleep 
Through all the unbroken silence." 

Softntus agrestmm Lcnis virorum non Jiumilcs domos 
Fastidit. Sleep will sometim the Doctor, press 

heavily on the lids, even when the mind is wakeful, and 
feverishly, or miserably employed ; but it will seldom 
"steep the senses " unless it be of that sound kind which 
denotes a healthy body and a heart at ease. " They 
who sleep soundly must be free from care." Referring 
to men of the lower classes in the south of Europe, who 
lie down in the sun or shade, according to the season, 
and fall asleep like dogs at any time, Southey remarks, 
that the less they are raised above animal life, the 
sounder the sleep is, and the more it seems to be an act 
ition with them ; when they close their eyes there 
is nothing within to keep them waking. 

re is that neither day nor night seeth sleep with 
lith he that applied his heart to know wisdom, 
and to see the business that is done upon the earth. 
th the son of Sirach, "will nut let 
a man slumtx ise break ." Shak- 

Brutus, having to summon Lucius again and 
ret, "I would it were my 
fault to 5] soundly." Well may both he and 

therefore be mistrusted by Caesar, who would 
fain h . it him men that "sleep o' nights." Find- 

Lin, when again wanted for service, his 
carev. tCT excl>. 

" Fast asleep ? I: is no matt 

Enjoy the h- 



442 WIDE-AWAKE CARE. 

Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies 

Which busy care draws in the brains of men ; 

Therefore thou sleep'st so sound." 

The lament of Samson Agonistes is that 
" Sleep hath forsook and giv'n me o'er 
To death's benumbing opium as my only cure : 
Thence faintings, swoonings of despair, 
And sense of Heaven's desertion." 

Care murders sleep in the case of Homer's king of men ; 
and at the same time, and for the same reason, is " his 
brother, pressed with equal woes, alike denied the gifts 
of soft repose." While all the world is at rest, poetically 
speaking, Virgil's Phcenissa neque unquam Solvitur in 
somnos, oculisve ant pectore noctem Accipit." It is the 
opening lament of Young's prolonged Complaint, that 
tired nature's sweet restorer, like the world, his ready 
visit pays where fortune smiles ; " the wretched he for- 
sakes ; swift on his downy pinions flies from woe, and 
lights on lids unsullied with a tear." Dying King 
Henry the Fourth at last sleeps soundly, a little before his 
last sleep of all — " yet not so sound and half so deeply 
sweet, as he whose brow, with homely biggin bound, 
snores out the watch of night." Sorrow, as Brakenbury 
says of Clarence, breaks seasons, and reposing hours 
make the night morning, and the noontide night. 

In Spenser we take note of Sir Scudamour as he lies 
long while expecting when gentle sleep his heavy eyes 
would close, 

" Oft changing sides, and oft new place electing, 
Where better seem'd he mote himselfe repose ; 
And oft in wrath he thence again uprose ; 
And oft in wrath he layd him downe againe. 
But, wheresoere he did himselfe dispose, 
He by no means could wished ease obtaine : 
So every place seem'd painefull, and ech changing vaine." 

A pendant, or parallel, may be found in Chaucer's 
Romaunt of the Rose : 



REMORSE AXD SLEEP. 443 

" To bedde as fast thou wolt thee (light, 
Where thou shalt have but smal delite ; 
For whanne thou'wenest for to slepe, 
So full of peyne shalt thou crepe, 
Sterte in thi bedde about full wide, 
And turne full ofte on every side ; 
Now downward groffe, and now upright, 
And walowe in woo the longe nyght.'' 

Rousseau says that misfortune and distress respect 
sleep, and leave the mind that inexpressible solace ; that 
it is only remorse which denies and destroys it. Perhaps 
he would but have taken the assumed exception to prove 
his rule, had he been told of Mary Stuart, after writing a 
casket letter to Bothwell, lying down upon her bed, " to 
sleep, doubtless — sleep with the soft tranquillity of an 
innocent child." Remorse, Mr. Froude observes, may dis- 
turb the slumbers of the man who is dabbling with his first 
experiences of wrong ; and when the pleasure has been 
tasted and is gone, and nothing is left of the crime but 
the ruin which it has wrought, then too the Furies take 
their scats upon the midnight pillow ; but the " meridian 
of evil is for the most part left unvexed/'as though, when 
human creatures have chosen their road, they were left 
to follow it to the end. u I would fain have closed 
my eyes," writes Lovelace, " but sleep flies me." And 
he Clt version of Horace, and thinks it well 

said, on either part : 

'• The halcyon sleep will never build his nest 
In any stormy bn 

not enough that he doth find 
Clouds and darkness in the mind : 

rkneS9 but half his work will do, 
'Tis not enough ; he must find quiet too." 

impairs the rot of Lovelace, his vic- 
tim's sleeplessness becomes another kind of exception 

IU*S rule. " Rest IS less in my power than 

ever," writes Clarissa, when excusing herself for so much 



444 STRAINS OF THE SLEEPLESS. 

penwork by night : "Sleep has a long time ago quar- 
relled with me, and will not be friends, although I have 
made the first advances. What will be, must." Not 
always the innocent sleep, though it be true that remorse 
doth murder sleep. But remorse is supreme in that 
aspect of murder as one of the fine arts. Eugene Aram 
in the poem tells how all night he lay in agony, in 
anguish dark and deep ; his fevered eyes he dared not 
close, but stared aghast at Sleep. Byron's Alp in vain 
turns from side to side, to court repose ; the turban 
presses on his hot brow, and the mail weighs lead-like 
on his breast, 

" Though oft and long beneath its weight 

Upon his eyes had slumber sate, 

Without or couch or canopy, 

Except a rougher field and sky 

Than now might yield a warrior's bed, 

Than now along the heaven was spread. 

He could not rest, he could not stay 

Within his tent to wait for day, 

But walked him forth along the sand, 

Where thousand sleepers strewed the strand. 

What pillowed them ? and why should he 

More wakeful than the humblest be ? 

Since more their peril, worse their toil, 

And yet they fearless dream of spoil ; 

While he alone, where thousands passed 

A night of sleep, perchance their last, 

In- sickly vigil wandered on, 

And envied all he gazed upon." 

Scott has his companion picture, so far as the envying 
is concerned. It is where Oswald watches the lamp, and 
tells from hour to hour the castle-bell, and listens to the 
cry of the owlet and the whistle of the saddening breeze, 
and catches, by fits, 

" the timeless rhyme 

With which the warder cheats the time, 
And envying thinks, how, when the sun 
Bids the poor soldier's watch be done 



LOSS OF SLEEP. 445 



Couched on his straw, and fancy-free, 
He sleeps like careless infancy." 

Goethe's Count Egmont, in prison, apostrophizes sleep 
as " old friend ! n and asks unbraidingly, does even faith- 
ful sleep too forsake him, like his other friends ? Sleep, 
that was wont of yore to descend unsought upon his 
free brow ; and in whose arms, amid the din of battle, on 
the waves of life, he rested, breathing lightly as a grow- 
Sweet sleep ! like the purest happiness, thou 
comest most willingly when uninvited, unsought." 
Shelley's Lionel bewails the change within him — especi- 
ally that from sleep most vainly must his wear)- brain im- 
plore its long-lost flattery now. The wail is heard in The 
Lost Bower of Mrs. Browning, " I have lost the sound 
child-sleeping which the thunder could not break." 
Byron at six-and-twenty complained that sleep was no 
friend of his, though he courted him sometimes for half 
the twenty-four hours. Hood calls bed 

" That heaven upon earth to the weary head ; 
But a place that to name would be ill-bred 

To the head with a wakeful trouble — 
'Tis held by such a different lease ! 
To one, a place of comfort and peace. 
All stuffed with the down of stubble gl 

To another with only the stubble ! 
. .1 perfect I [alcyon nest, 
All calm, and balm, and quiet, and 1 

And soft as the fur of the cony — 

another, so restle>-> for body and head, 
That the bed seem l from Nettlebed, 

And the pillow from Stratford the Siony. 
' iss cirri. 1 

the Land of Nod. or wh< re you pie 
• alas I for the watchers and weep 
Wl d turn, and turn again, 

But turn, and turn, and turn in train, 
With an anxious brain, 

ill a train 
run upon ' sta ; 



446 HOOD OX LOSS OF SLEEP. 

u Wide-awake as the mousing owl, 
Night-hawk, or other nocturnal fowl — 

But more profitless vigils keeping, — 
Wide-awake in the dark they stare, 
Filling with phantoms the vacant air, 
As if that Crook-backed Tyrant Care 

Had plotted to kill them sleeping. 

" And oh I when the blessed diurnal light 
Is quenched by the providential night, 

To render our slumber more certain, 
Pit\-, pity the wretches that weep, 
For they must be wretched who cannot sleep 

When God Himself draws the curtain." * 

Sage mediciners warn us that when no such special 
cause for sleeplessness exists as is supplied by the pre- 

* Space is not, like the poet's wealth of conceit in illustration, 
inexhaustible ; and out of numerous other stanzas of his in fugue- 
like pursuit of the restless theme, space can here be only found, 
and that in a footnote, for the following : 

•'•' The careful Betty the pillow beats, 
And airs the blankets, and smooths the sheets, 

And gives the mattress a shaking — 
But vainly Betty performs her part, 
If a ruffled head and a rumpled heart 

As well as the couch want making. 

•'•' There's Morbid, all bile, and verjuice, and nerves, 
Where other people would make preserves 

He turns his fruits into pickles : 
Jealous, envious, and fretful by day, 
At night, to his own sharp fancies a prey, 
He lies like a hedgehog rolled up the wrong way, 

Tormenting himself with his prickles. 
***** 
;; Oh, bed : bed ! bed ! delicious bed ! 
That heaven upon earth to the wear}- head, 

Whether lofty or low its condition ! 
But instead of putting our plagues on shelves, 
In our blankets how often we toss ourselves, 
Or are tossed by such allegorical elves 

As Pride, Hate, Greed, and Ambition ! ■ 



THAT WAY MADXESS LIES. 447 

sence of acute pain, and when for two, three, or more 
nights in succession sleep refuses to visit the eyes and 
steep the senses in forgetfulness, to be blind to the sig- 
nificance of such a symptom is to be blind indeed. V It 
means that reason is tottering on its throne — that, come 
what may, medical counsel must be called in, and sleep, 
either artificial or natural, in some way secured." The 
arch-assailant of private u asylums " somewhere calls sleep 
" that vile foe to insanity and all our diseases, private asy- 
lums included;" and in the story with a purpose which he 
wrote against them, he shows how at the establishment 
selected for warning example, practice made perfect in 
undermining by artificial sleeplessness that organ which 
an asylum professes to soothe — the victim's sleep being 
driven away by " biting insects and barking dogs, two 
opiates provided in many of these placid retreats, with a 
view to the permanence, rather than the comfort, of the 
lodgers/' " As for sleep, it is hardly known : insects, 
without a name to ears polite, but highly odoriferous 
and profoundly carnivorous, bite you all night, and dogs 
howl eternally outside." The late Lord Lytton re- 
marked on the portentous degree in which a single 

it wholly without sleep will tell on the face of early 
youth : not till we, " hard veterans/' said he, have gone- 
through such struggles as life permits not to the slight 
responsibilities of raw recruits, — not till sleepless nights 
have grown to us familiar,— " will the beat of the east 
wind leave :. on the rind/'' In a much less mature 

w<>rk of his, when an audible yawn from the slim secre- 
tary rou !. . V . pave from his reverie, "I envyyou, 
my young friend," says the latter: " It is a pleasure we- 
lder — that of being sleep)'." Friar 

vrence duties Romeo for invading his cell so early 
in the dawn — 



448 FORSAKEN OF SLEEP. 

" Young son, it argues a distemper'd head 
So soon to bid good morrow to thy bed : 
Care keeps his watch in every old man's eye, 
And where care lodges, sleep will never lie ; 
But where unbruised youth with unstuff'd brain 
Doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign." 

Well may Youth be exhorted to cherish that happiest 
of earthly boons while yet at its command — for there 
cometh the day when " neither the voice of the lute nor 
the birds " {non avium, citharceque, etc.) shall bring back 
the sweet slumbers that fell on their young eyes, as un- 
bidden as the dews. It is a dark epoch in a man's life, 
says one who knew, when sleep forsakes him ; when he 
tosses to and fro, and thought will not be silenced ; 
when the drug and draught are the courtiers of stupe- 
faction, not sleep ; when the down pillow is as a knotted 
log ; when the eyelids close but with an effort, and there 
is a drag, and a weight, and a dizziness in the eyes at 
morn. After Mr. Thackeray has told us of young Pen- 
dennis in trouble, that, not having been in the habit of 
passing wakeful nights, he at once fell off into a sound 
sleep, he goes on to observe, that even in later days and 
with a great deal of care and other thoughtful matter to 
keep him awake, a man from long practice or fatigue or 
resolution begins by going to sleep as usual and gets a 
nap in advance of Anxiety. " But she soon comes up 
with him and jogs his shoulder, and says, ' Come, my 
man, no more of this laziness, you must wake up and 
have a talk with me/ Then they fall together in the 
midnight.'" Balzac says that out of ten nights pledged 
to hard work by young people, they give up seven to 
sleep : // faut avoir plus de vingt ans pour veiller. 
Horace Walpole in 1777 tells a correspondent that 
within these two months, sleep, which had been his con- 
stant support and food, had begun to grow coy. " Can 
I wonder ? At first I had a mind to find a cause ; but I 



STATESMEN AND SLEEP. 449 

recollected that twenty years ago I should have said 
to myself, if a person of sixty complained, ' The poor 
soul does not consider it is three-score ! ' " Some five- 
and-twenty years before, he had given Sir Horace 
Mann this account of his father, Sir Robert — that he, 
who used to fall asleep as soon as his head touched 
the pillow, M for I have frequently known him snore ere 
they had drawn his curtains, now never sleeps above 
an hour without waking/' Things looked bad with 
Burke when he made up to the chair of the House 
of Commons one night, and said, u I am not well, 
Speaker, — I eat and drink too much, and I sleep very 
little." To a friend he complained later, " I sleep ill 
at night; and am drowsy and sleep much in the day." 
It looked bad for Pitt when he had to confess to a con- 
fidant, in April, 1800, that he had "lost the talent of 
sound sleep," which was now always broken, and de- 
pending more or less on the current transactions of the 
day. This was the same man, and yet quite another, of 
whom the story is told, three years previously, to show 
how calm he was when all around him were in agitation, 
that the First Lord of the Admiralty one night repaired 
to him with news from the fleet of especial urgency — 
and that being roused from his slumbers in Downing 
Street, he heard the case, and gave his instructions, and 
Lord Spencer took leave and withdrew ; but, just at the 
end of the street, remembering a point he had omitted 
to state, the First Lord hurried back to Pitt's house, and 
desired to be shown Up a second time to Pitt's chamber; 
and there, after so brief an Interval, he found Pitt as 
before, buried in profound repose. Even Mr. Pepys, in 
his day, "good, easy man, full surely," found his rest 
spoilt by tidings of the fleet ; witness his Diary of Sept. 
9, 1665 : " Full of these melancholy thoughts, to bed ; 
where, though I lay the softest I ever did in my life, 

G G 



45o HAUNTING DREAD OF SLEEPLESSNESS. 

with a down bed, after the Danish manner, upon me, yet 
I slept very ill, chiefly through the thoughts of my Lord 
Sandwich's concernment in all this ill success at sea/'' 
Haply, however, a down bed, after the Danish manner, 
upon Mr. Pepys, may have had something to do with 
his lamented unrest. 

Readers of Washington Irving' s Life and Letters may 
call to mind how distressed he was in advanced age, not 
more by want of rest than by a dread of losing it alto- 
gether. He would tell affectionate inquirers after his last 
night's rest, " I am apt to be rather fatigued, my dear, by 
my night's rest." Entirely sleepless some of his nights 
were, and then he would repeat pathetically Othello's 
plaint on the impotent aid of poppy and mandragora 
and all the drowsy syrups of the world. One passage in 
his nephew's Diary (Jan, 12, 1858) is significant: "His 
nervousness returned. Again haunted with the idea that 
he could not sleep. Strange disease, which seemed to 
want reality, and yet the most distressing." Almost a 
mania became the tendency to a similar feeling with the 
late Mr. Angell James, who, for about twenty years of 
his life, if he had made a promise to preach, would wake 
in the night, and be kept awake by the spectral promise. 
" I go to bed dreading I shall not sleep, and the predic- 
tion verifies itself. Then I calculate there are so many 
weeks to intervene, and that I shall not sleep comfort- 
ably till it is over, and how can I endure broken rest so 
long ? " By this time the matter had got such a hold of 
him, that neither reason nor religion could throw it off ; 
it was not a dread of the service itself, but a dread that 
he should not sleep till it was over. This has fairly been 
accounted strange in a man who could commit a sermon 
two hours long to memory without misplacing a word, 
and hold his immense audience in breathless attention 
till it was over. But it is to be classed, even if in a class 



SIFFERERS FROM SLEEPLESSNESS. 451 

by itself, among the idiosyncrasies of nervous affections. 
Dread of loss of sleep may easily gain upon a sensitive 
temperament, aware that " that way madness lies." For 
insanity, or else death, is the natural close of the un- 
natural condition, when sleeplessness is entire and pro- 
longed. Paulus /Emilius, according to Plutarch, was 
done to death by his keepers absolutely debarring him 
from any snatch and every chance of sleep. 

" La Parque, d'une main fatale, 
Arrachant de mes yeux les paisibles pavots, 
Pour moi ne rila point une heure de repos," — 

so Gresset writes, retrospectively reviewing his time of 
pain and languishing. Night is the sabbath of mankind, 
as Butler's belaboured knight is unkindly told, " to rest 
the body and the mind, which thou art now denied to 
keep, and cure thy laboured corpse with sleep." Many 
were the nights that to Pascal were made sleepless by 
pain. Scarron's epitaph is pathetic in its appeal : 

" Passants, nc faites pas de bruit, 
De crainte que je ne m'cveille ; 
Car voila la premiere nuit 

Que le pauvre Scarron sommeille." 

Montesquieu, on the other hand, exulted in his settled 
capacity of passing the night satis s' cvcillcr ; and he 
told Mde. du Chatelct, that instead of denying herself 
sleep for the sake of learning philosophy, she ought to 
study philosophy for the sake of learning to sleep. Not 
his, but Vauvenargucs', is the Maximc about reflections 
giving us the slip when we summon them, and besieging 
us when we would drive they away, for then they " tien- 
nent malgre* nous nos yeux ouverts pendant la nuit." 
Montesquieu has a Maximc quite to the Opposite effect, 
about himself, " quand je vais au lit," — how his happy 
temperament then and there " m'einpeche de faire des 
reflexions." Next to nothing he knew of, and as little 



452 NIGHTS OF SLEEPLESSNESS. 



he cared for, the sleep-spirits invoked by a sleep-forsaken 
bard, in the verses beginning, " Toil hath rest at set of 
sun, but his brother Care hath none;" verses by one 
whose complaint elsewhere it is that 



not to me 



Comes genial rest, though oft entreated dear ; 
But anxious thoughts, that nightly watchers be 
Beside my lonely couch, the servants drear 
Of restless Grief and heart-oppressing Fear, 
True to their penal ministry, repel 
Soft-footed Sleep, with looks and tones severe, 
And words, whose import deep I may not tell." 

Bitter is the cry of De Maistre's le Lepreux, " Ah ! 
monsieur, les insomnies, les insomnies ! Vous ne pouvez 
vous figurer combien est longue et triste une nuit/' etc. 
Readers of Charlotte Bronte's Life may recall those 
nights of " sick, dreary, wakeful misery " when she, who 
had never been a good sleeper, was no longer able to get 
any sleep at all. Milverton tells us of the " sleep-shop " 
and its customers in Realmah, that women bought much 
cheaper kinds of the sleep on sale, and less even of those 
kinds, than men ; and the reason alleged is, that a much 
larger part of the anxiety, vexation, and remorse of the 
world is felt by men than by women ; and therefore the 
men want more sleep, and of the best quality. 



Devices for wooing reluctant sleep are diversified 
enough, and frequently all too disappointing and inef- 
ficient. Medical biographers of the great Harvey are 
careful to put on record that, being troubled with sleep- 
lessness, he used to get up and walk about his room in 
his shirt, till he was pretty cool, or even till he began to 
shiver, when he would return to bed and fall into a sleep. 
Sir Henry Holland congratulated himself on having 
committed to memory a large amount of Italian and 



SUXDRY DEVICES FOR CETTIXG TO SLEEP. 453 

German poetry, so pleasurable a possession had he found 
it in later life — not only when travelling alone, or in 
places where some distraction of thought or feeling was 
required, but even for the " more commonplace object 
of courting sleep/'' he adds, when sleep is reluctant to 
come, " these poetical recollections have served me bet- 
ter than any of the ordinary devices for that purpose." 
He speaks of having a large provision of Dante always 
at hand for such use, but finds it easier and more luxu- 
rious to steal into slumber through a sonnet of Petrarch, 
or the stanzas of Ariosto and Tasso. " The sonnet is 
perhaps the most effective soporific, in whatever lan- 
guage it be written." Mr. G. W. Kendall, in his nar- 
rative of the Texan Santa Fe* expedition, pronounces 
sleep to be " a very simple process upon a campaign M 
— a soft place selected on the ground, and a blanket to 
roll oneself in, making up the co-efficients ; but he adds, 
that should any of his readers ever undertake a tour of 
the kind, and find any difficulty in getting to sleep, he 
can recommend a plan which " has never been known 
to fail in a single instance : just count the stars." Mr. 
Herman Melville, at sea, resorts to certain mathematical 
reveries to induce repose, having found the multiplica- 
tion-table of no avail ; next, summoning up "a greyish 
image of chaos in a sort of sliding fluidity," he falls into 
a nap on the strength of it. Horace's proposed specific 
(referring to Trebatius, who is noted in Cicero's corre- 
spondence as a good swimmer) is to swim thrice across 
the Tiber : u Ter uncti Transnanto Tibertm, somnoquibus 

est opus alto;" after which a sound .sleep should come as 
a matter of course ; but only perhaps from sheer physi- 
cal fatigue, such as King Pedro, mourning for Inez, the 

chronicle tells us, secured by dint ^ proces- 
sions by torch-light, when he ordered out his trumpets 

on sleepless nights and danced along the streets, till the 



454 A SOPORIFIC SUCCESS. 

dawn brought him back, exhausted, to his palace * The 
traditionary story of the Earl of Lauderdale suggests a 
simpler, less expensive, and less exhausting remedy. 
His lordship's medical advisers were at their wits' ends 
how to make him sleep, and could only agree that with- 
out sleep being induced he could not recover. His son, 
then reckoned a "daft" lad, and, as such, left all but 
quite uneducated, — and this boy grew up to be the Duke 
of Lauderdale, so " famous or infamous " in his country's 
history, — cried out from under the table, where he was 
squatting, to the embarrassed leeches, " Sen' for the 
preaching man frae Livingstone, for he aye sleeps in the 
kirk." One of the doctors favoured the prescription ; 
the experiment of "getting a minister till him" suc- 
ceeded ; the earl slumbered and slept, and recovered his 
health. It had not then been discovered how much the 
position of the bedstead has to do with causing sleepless 
nights, for no " Scottish Curative Mesmeric Association " 
was as yet in existence, to broach the theory that folks 
should lie with their heads to the north, and not on any 
account to the west ; in harmony with the doctrine of 
Dr. Julius von dem Fischweiler, of Magdeburg, who 
ascribed his own great age, professedly 109 years, en- 
tirely to his always pointing his heels to the south when 
in bed. It is in reference to him that a Saturday 
Reviewer deems the recent application of the doctrine 
of polarity to the phenomena of sleep, "fanciful as it 
may seem to some," to be one of those novelties which 
may well invite attention, enforced as it is by the potent 
instance of the philosopher who introduced it. 

Jean Paul's eccentric Leibgeber, being seldom able 
to get a proper, reasonable nap at night in a solitary, 
deserted bedstead, on account of the struggle of thoughts 

* Suetonius tells how Caligula would run from gallery to gallery 
to wear out his sleepless nights. 



DEVICES TO COAX SLEEP. 455 

in his brain, used to haunt a club-house, where a truce 
between his thoughts would soon be effected : the de- 
lightful confusion arising from everybody's speaking at 
once, — the political and other conversational pic-nic of 
words, of which he heard " now an ultima, now a penul- 
tima," — this was already a good precursor of sleep ; but 
when they went to work more systematically still, and a 
proposition was discussed on all sides with true logical 
acumen, and most closely investigated by a universal 
screaming hubbub, then indeed he fell asleep "as soundly 
as a flower which is rocked, but not awakened by the 
storm, and his quicksilver was quite stationary." 
Southey's second chapter of The Doctor is professedly 
written to show that an author may more easily be kept 
awake by his own imaginations than put to sleep by 
them himself, whatever may be their effect upon his 
readers. He who in summer habitually closed his eyes 
as instinctively as the daisy when the sun goes down, 
and who in winter, by his own account, could hybernate 
as well as Bruin, had he but fat enough, — he whose 
pedigree, if properly made out, would prove him, he 
fancied, to be a direct descendant from one of the Seven 
Sleepers, and from the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, — 
now in a pronounced case of insomnolence, and vain 
were all his devices to coax sleep, — such as putting his 
arms out of bed, turning the pillow for the sake of ap- 
plying a cold surface to his cheek, stretching his feet 
into the cold corner, listening to the river and to the 
ticking of his watch, thinking of all sleep}' sounds and 
of all soporific things — the How of water, the humming 
of bees, the motion of a boat, the waving of a field of 
corn, the nodding of a mandarin's head on the chim- 
ney-piece, a horse in a mill, Mr. Humdrum's conver- 
sation, Mr. 'ems, Mr. Laxative's speeches, 
Mr. Lengthy's sermons. He tried the device of his own 



45<? SOPORIFIC SPECIFICS. 

childhood, and fancied that the bed revolved with him 
round and round. At last Morpheus, as he has it, 
reminded him of Dr. Torpedo's divinity lectures, where 
the voice, the manner, the matter, even the very atmo- 
sphere, and the streamy candle-light, were all alike 
somnific ; — where he who by strong effort lifted up his 
head, and forced open the reluctant eyes, never failed to 
see all around him fast asleep. Lettuces, cowslip wine, 
poppy syrup, mandragora, hop pillows, spider's-web pills, 
and the whole tribe of narcotics, up to bang and the 
black drop, would, he is positive, have failed ; " but this 
was irresistible ; and thus twenty years after date I 
found benefit from having attended the course." He 
was too far away to try Erskine's infallible specific, 
resort to the watch-box of one of those old Charlies 
whose determined propensity to doze was a standing 
joke in their day. A friend of Erskine's who was suf- 
fering from a continuous wakefulness, was experimented 
upon in vain with various methods of enticing sleep ; 
but being advisedly dressed in a watchman's coat, and 
placed in a sentry-box, lantern in hand, he was asleep 
in ten minutes. The hero in Le Nceud Gordien of 
Charles de Bernard found an ever-availing resource in 
repeating the first book of Voltaire's Henriade, which 
was his approved substitute for opium in case of sleep- 
lessness ; despite the excitement of his mind and the 
irritation of his nerves, he would fall asleep before he 
got to the sixtieth line. Given an occasion of agitation 
and unrest, and, " O Henriade ! c'est le cas de me verser 
tes pavots," would be his cry at bedtime, and within ten 
minutes of that exercise he would be fast. And yet 
there comes later a crisis in his career when all specifics 
fail. "Vainement j'appelai a mon secours mes nar- 
cotiques accoutumes," including for instance the multi- 
plying of two figures by two others (for him a prodigious 



SOPORIFIC SPECIFICS. 457 

tour dc force in arithmetic), and going over the chro- 
nology of the kings of France since Pharamond ; and 
lastly, as a last resource, and a hitherto infallible opiate, 
the reciting an ode of his own composition, in the style 
of the Harmonics of Lamartine. "J'eus un moment 
d'espoir promptement decu; je baillai, mais je ne dormis 
pas." Charles Lamb had a fellow-clerk extremely given 
to prosing ; and " when I can't sleep o' nights," he tells 
a correspondent, " I imagine a dialogue with Mr. H. 
upon any given subject, and go prosing on in fancy with 
him, till I either laugh or fall asleep. I have literally 
found it answer." Ellesmere, finding himself sleepless 
the night before a great trial in which he, now Sir John, 
was to lead, got a volume of Victor Hugo's Lcs Misc- 
rablcs, which " great book," says he, happily contains 
certain long parenthetical discussions which are not very 
exciting : " I fell upon one of these, and in half an hour 
I was in a sweet and composed frame of mind, and I 
had five hours' good sleep that night." Southey's enu- 
meration of vainly courted aids and appliances, soporific 
or sleep-compelling, has its poetic parallel in one of 
Wordsworth's three sonnets to sleep ; but the Rydal 
Bard is more serious : 

" A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by, 
( foe after one ; the sound of rain, and bees 
Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas, 
Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky ; 
I have thought of all by turns, and yet do lie 
Sleepless ! and soon the small birds' melodies 
Must hear, first uttered from my orchard tu 
And the first cuckoo's melancholy cry. 
1. 1 n thus last night, and two nights more, I lay, 

And could not win thee, Sleep, by any stealth ; 
So do not let me wear tO-night away : 
Without thee what is all the mornimfs wealth ? 
Come, blessed barrier between day and day, 
Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health I'' 



XL. 

A DEADLY FIGHT THAT MUST BE FOUGHT 

OUT 

ECCLESIASTES viii. 8. 

THERE is no man, it stands written, " that hath 
power over the spirit, to retain the spirit ; neither 
hath he power in the day of death : and there is no dis- 
charge in that war." The war must be waged to the 
bitter end. The fight must be fought out. And each 
man must fight it out himself. There can be no substi- 
tute, as there can be no discharge, in that war. 

Xo man, saith the Psalmist, may deliver his brother, 
nor make agreement unto God for him ; " so that he 
must let that alone for ever." 

There's one single combat we must all engage in, 
though we know for a surety, as a living writer puts it, 
that we shall be beaten ; we cannot shirk it, and give 
Death the game ; he will wrestle it out with us. Je 
connais, says the old French poet, Villon, 

" que pauvres et riches, 

Sages et fous, pretres et lais, 
Xoble etvilain, larges et chicbes, 
Petits et grands, et beaux et laids, 
Mort saisit sans exception." 

Chaucer's is the reminder that — 

■'•' Death menaceth even- age, and smyt 
In ech estat, for ther escapith noon. 
And as certeyn, as we know everychon 
That we schuln deye," etc. 

Decker's old Fortunatus muses that, though his arm 

should conquer twenty worlds, 

" There 's a lean fellow beats all conquerors ; 
The greatest strength expires with loss of breath, 
The mightiest in one minute stoop to death." 



THE IXEIT TABLE HOUR. 

Death a due debt, is the theme of an Elizabethan minor 
poet, unnamed : 

" Death hath in the earth a right ; 
His power is great, it stretch eth f~ 
No lord, no prince, can 'scape his might ; 
No creature can his dutie b_ 
The wise, the just, the strong, the 
The chaste, the meeke, the free of hart, 
The rich, the poor, who can der. 
Have yeelded all unto his d- 

Or as a French contemporary of his, not without ana: 
— for it is Malherbe, — discour^ 

u La. Mort a des rigueurs a nulle autre pareilles ; 
On a beau la prier ; 
La cruelle quelle est se bouche les oreilles, 
Et nous laisse en. 

Pascal, again, in one of his Pensees, pictures mankind 
as a group of condemned prisoners, in chains, of whom 
some are daily cut off in the sight of their fellows, who 
await their turn, and know it to be inevitable when it 
shall come. Ever applicable is the voice of CEdipus 
to his daughters, when he feels his last hour so nigh, so 
very present indeed — 

Biov reXccr^, c'oKctr'fo-r' tMroorpo^ij. 

Chalmers dilates impressively on the details of the 
death-bed — the warning of death seen on the sick man's 

. and h :oms gather arki nd get 

ascendency over all the min: 
and of human tend when it ^comes 

more obvious that the patient is n nd, and 

that nothing in the whole compass of art, or any of 
its resc the advance of doom — when, from 

morning to night, and from night to morning, the watch- 
ful family sit at his couch, and guard his bi um- 
bers, and interpret all b .'.s, and try to hide from 



460 DEATH-BED GAZERS: 

him their tears, — and then in a little while their despair, 
when they can only turn them to cry at his last agonies, 
so little is it that weeping children and inquiring neigh- 
bours can do for him, and so piteous is the contrast 
between the " unrelenting necessity of the grave, and the 
feebleness of every surrounding endeavour to ward it." 
To feel one's helplessness, even in the case of a dying 
brute, is saddening enough to a heart that does feel at 
all — as Burns bears record in his " unco mournfu' tale " 
of the death of " puir Mailie," his only pet yowe : 

" Wi' glowrin een, an' lifted han's, 
Poor Hughoe like a statue Stan's. 
He saw her days were near-hand ended, 
But, wae 's my heart ! he could na mend it ! 
He gaped wide, but naething spak," etc. 

Tenderness, without a capacity of relieving, says Gold- 
smith, only makes the man who feels it more wretched 
than the object in need of assistance. Mrs. Trench, 
writing beside her baby's sick-bed, expressively penned 
a wish, at a time when the first Napoleon was supreme 
in Europe, " that Buonaparte may have a sick child, as 
I think the cry of an infant, whose pain one cannot know 
or assuage, would make him feel his want of power, 
though nothing else has done it." When by the bed of 
languishment we sit, as Young has pictured the session, 

" Or, o'er our dying friends, in anguish hang, 
Wipe the cold dew, or stay the sinking head, 
Number their moments, and, in every clock, 
Start at the voice of an eternity ; 
See the dim lamp of life just feebly lift 
An agonizing beam, at us to gaze, 
Then sink again, and quiver into death, 
The most pathetic herald of our own ; 
How read we such sad scenes ? " 

Feltham declares no spectacle to be more profitable, or 
more awful, than the sight a dying man, when he lies "ex- 



POWERLESS TO HELP. 461 

piringhis last" — to see all his friends, "like conduits, drop- 
ping tears about him ; while he neither knows his wants, 
nor they his cure ; nay, even the physician, whose whole 
life is nothing but a study and practice to preserve the lives 
of others, is now as one gazing at a comet, which he can 
reach with nothing but his eye." When the ruler's little 
child was dying, says a feeling commentator, what could 
he do but turn his back upon the house where was the 
darkened room, and the little bed, and the white little 
face laid upon the pillow, and the cold lips labouring 
with the rapid breath, — turn his back upon all these, — 
because Jic could do nothing to help, and hasten away 
along the lake side, going in his despair " to One mighty 
to save," and beseeching Him, " Lord, come down ere 
my child die ! " St. Clare, in the American story, 
watching his Eva's last hour, has the despair without 
the resource : " They stood there so still, gazing upon 
her, that even the ticking of the watch seemed too loud. 
. . . The house was soon roused — lights were seen, 
footsteps heard, anxious faces thronged the verandah, 
and looked tearfully through the glass doors ; but St. 
Clair heard and said nothing — he saw only that look on 
the face of the little sleeper. . . . He saw a spasm 
of mortal agony pass over the face — she struggled for 
breath, and threw up her little hands. . . . They 
pressed around her in breathless stillness." A yet more 
popular writer than even the one here quoted works up 
an exclamatory description of the suspense, the fearful 
mute susp f standing idly by while the life of ore 

we dearly love is trembling in the balance ; of the 
desperate anxiety "to be doing something" to relieve 
the pain, or lessen the danger which we have no power 
to remove — and the sinking of soul and spirit which 
the saddening conviction of our helplessness produces : 
u What tortures can equal these ? what reflections or 



462 DEATH-BED WATCHERS, 

endeavours can, in the full tide and fever of the time, 
allay them ? " Above all, if the distraught gazer is 
responsible in some degree for the fatal issue — as in a 
case pictured by Goethe, when the last malady seizes the 
being whose untimely grave you have prepared, " when 
languid and exhausted she lies before you, her dim eyes 
raised to heaven, and the damp of death upon her pallid 
brow, then you stand at her bedside like a condemned 
criminal, with the bitter feeling that your whole fortune 
could not save her, that all your efforts are powerless to 
impart even a moment's strength " to the ebbing life. 

Dryden has a simile of " helpless friends, who view 
from shore the labouring ship, and hear the tempest 
roar." So those he is describing stood, as he describes 
them, with their arms across, not to assist, but to de- 
plore the inevitable loss. 

" Oh pain, when one sees 
This ebbing, receding, 
This gliding away 
From out of our clasp ; 
Which nothing can stay 
Despite our wild grasp ! 
It ebbs like the sea, 
The vast mighty ocean 
That with a sure motion 
Recedes and is gone." * 

George Eliot tells us of Janet Dempster, as she sat on 
the edge of the bed through the long hours of candle- 
light, and watched her dying husband, and kept her left 
hand on the cold unanswering right hand that lay beside 
her on the bed-clothes, and heard no sound but her hus- 
band's breathing and the ticking of the watch on the 
mantelpiece — that she "only felt that the husband of 
her youth was dying ; far, far out of her reach, as if she 
were standing helpless on the shore, while he was sink- 

* Charles Boner : On the Death of Madame Lindwurm. 



POWERLESS TO SAVE. 463 

ing in the black storm-waves." So runs again a stanza 
in one of Emily Bronte's poems, with a difference 
(in wave-colour) : 

An anxious gazer from the shore, 
I marked the whitening wave, 
And wept above thy fate the more 
Because I could not save." 

What can any of us do, what have any of us done, 
another of the sisterhood has asked, who may have sat 
holding in our arms a dear form, from which the life was 
passing ? — the life for which gladly we would have given 
our own in exchange ; when we have felt and watched 
it fleeting from us, and we, ignorant and blind, vainly 
striving to arrest the inevitable doom. Another, again, 
describes a watcher that sees the lamp of life thus dying 
out for lack of oil, and has so consciously no power to 
re-illumine it. "In such moments it is that we feel our 
awful impotency, that we recognise ourselves as worms." 
That Henry Viscount Palmerston who died in 1802, lost 
in 1769 the wife, his epitaph on whom thus commences : 

.oe'er like me with trembling anguish brings 
His heart's whole treasure to fair Bristol's sprir._ 
Whoe'er like me, to soothe disease and pain, 
Shall pour those salutary springs in vain ; 
Condemned like me to hear the faint reply, 
To mark the fading cheek, the sinking 
From the chilled brow to wipe the damps of death, 
And watch in dumb despair the shortening breath ; 
If chance directs him to this artless line, 

I the sad mourner know his pangs were mine 

When first the terrible thought came home to Nelly 
L StraD . that her dear old father, Sir Adrian, was very 
ill — dying — she rebelled fi ainst it, pushed it 

violently from her. It could nut, would not be, — it was 
too bad to happen, — and her soul "went up agonizedly" 
to the great God above her, in intercession fur that dear 
old life. In nightly visions on her dark bed, she wrestled 



464 LOVE WEAKER THAN DEATH. 

and strove with the grisly phantom that drew so near, 
and whose was the presence that is not to be put by : 
" I would stand in the breach between him and my old 
man ; he should not come at him, should not smite him 
with that mighty blade that lays the generations low ; 
but to what purpose ? He has put me aside, he is draw- 
ing ever nigher, not stealthily, insidiously, but openly in 
the eye of day, so that all may count his strides and 
mark his coming." What torture, she elsewhere asks, 
can be comparable to that of standing, with one dearer 
to us than life, on the edge of that awfullest, blackest 
gulf, seeing him slipping, slipping down to it, and we un- 
able to stretch out a finger to prevent the fall, or to help 
him back again up the kindly hither bank ? — " During 
all those dragging, weary hours I sat by him," says 
Eleanor of her father, " holding his hand ; as if that 
could keep him back from the gulf he was nearing." 
" It is hard work dying ; a bitter weary tussle ; but ah ! 
surely it is harder seeing another die." As she sat and 
listened to the gasping breath, that grew ever quicker, 
harder, shorter, it made her out of breath herself to hear 
him labouring, panting so. " How I longed to ' give him 
half my powers, to eke his being out ! ' " De profundis 
are drawn the suspiria sighed forth by the husband-poet 
of Kathrina : 

" Ah ! to wait for death : 

To see one's idol with the signature 

Of the Destroyer stamped upon her brow, 

And know that she is doomed, beyond all hope ; 

To watch her while she fades ; to see the form 

That once was Beauty's own become a corpse 

In all but breathing, and to meet her eyes 

A hundred times a day — while the heart bleeds — 

With smiles of smooth dissembling, and with words 

Cheerful as mourning, and to do all this 

Through weeks and weary months, till one half-longs 

To see the spell dissolved, and feel the worst 



SEXTEXCE PASSED, EXECUTION DELA YED. 465 

That death can do : can there be misery 
Sadder than this ? " 

The grief is of the same kind, other in degree, with 
that expressed by Shakspeare's Henry the Sixth in the 
case of his doomed uncle, whom he bewails 

u With sad unhelpful tears ; and with dimm'd eyes 
Looks after him, and cannot do him good." 

How in keeping and in season with the last scene of 
the last act of the tragedy is dying King John's fevered 
appeal to the u sad unhelpful " bystanders, — 

"And none of you will bid the winter come, 
To thrust his icy fingers in my maw . . . 
And comfort me with cold : — I do not ask you much, 
I beg cold comfort ; and you are so strait, 
And so ingrateful, you deny me that." 

His son, the prince Henry, can but answer, weeping, 

"Oh that there were some virtue in my tears 
That might relieve you ! " 



XLI. 

SEXTEXCE PASSED, EXECUTION DELAYED. 

ECCLESIASTES viii. 1 1. 

" Raro antccedentem scelestum 
Deseruit pede Poena claudo." 

BUT, because sentence against an evil work is not 
executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons 
of men is fully set in them to do evil. Of old had it 

:i declared by the voice of Jehovah, "To me be- 

,eth vengeance and recompense ; their foot .shall 
slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at 
hand, and the things that .shall conn- upon them make- 
It is they that draw iniquity with cords of 

vanity, and sin as it were with a cart-rope, that say, 

II 11 



466 SENTENCE PASSED, EXECUTIOX DEFERRED. 

u Let Him make speed, and hasten His work that we 
may see it ; and let the counsel of the Holy One of 
Israel draw nigh and come, that we may know it. - " The 
scoffers of the last days it is, to whom the scoff is 
attributed, " Where is the promise of His coming ? " — 
the promise, or, to them, the threat. Though it tarry, 
wait for it, might belief reply to unbelief in the same 
tone, if the same tone were possible on such a subject 
to devout belief: it will surely come, it will not tarry: 
to some extent the execution of the sentence may be 
delayed ; but, sooner or later, execution is certain when 
sentence is passed. 

Habet Deus suas horas, et moras, says the Latin pro- 
verb ; and the Greek one is admired for energy of ex- 
pression as well as fulness of meaning : ; 0\>e Gecov 
aXeovac fivkoi, akeovai Be Xerrrd : The mill of God grinds 
late, but grinds to powder. So the English : " God 
comes with leaden feet, but strikes with iron hands." 
The noiseless approach and advance of these judgments, 
the manner in which they overtake secure sinners even in 
the hour of their doom, are set forth again in what Arch- 
bishop Trench pronounces the " awfully sublime " adage, 
Dii laucos Jiabent pedes : the feet of the (avenging) deities 
are shod with wool. " Who that has studied the history 
of the great crimes and criminals of the world, but will 
with a shuddering awe set his seal to the truth of this 
proverb ? " Scqaitur superbos ultor a tergo Dens, is a 
saw from Seneca ; and to the name of Orpheus is re- 
ferred this fragment about justice not being over long 
in overtaking ill-doers : Tol$ 8e kcikojs pe^aal 8lkt)<; reXcs 
ov%l yj>ovi<jTQv. It is the assured persuasion of Telema- 
chus that " come it will," the delayed hour of confusion 
to the intruders on his hearth and wasters of his sub- 
stance, though in his impatience he cannot refrain from 
the cry, the bitter aspiration, 



LAGGARD RETRIBUTIOX. 

" Approach that hour ! insufferable wrong 
Cries to the gods, and vengeance sleeps too lo: 

Anon he has Mentor's word for it, that "blind they 
rejoice, though now, e'en now, they fall ; death hastes 
amain; one hour o'erwhelms them all." Great criminals, 
says a popular French writer, bear about them a kind 
of predestination, which enables them to surmount all 
obstacles and to escape all dangers, till the moment 
which a wearied Providence has marked as the rock of 
their impious fortunes. Cowper tells us 

" There is a time, and justice marks the date, 
For long- forbearing clemency to wait ; 
That hour elapsed, the incurable revolt 
Is punished, and down comes the thunder-bolt." 

Juvenal has moralized on the same text as the Royal 
Preacher, about the heart of the sons of men being set 
in them to do evil, on the strength of delayed execution 
of the sentence against evil-doing. One is heard to 
- >n, in his thirteenth satire, that the wrath of God, 
though dreadful, is but slow : " With tardy progress 
comes the avenging blow. If all the bad are punished, 
'twill be long ere my turn comes to suffer in the throng" 
— and supposing the Powers to be not inexorable, that 
turn may never come at all : 

'['*. sit magna, tamen certe lenta ira Deorum 
Si curant igitur cunctos punire nocent 

ndo ad me venicnt ? Sed et exorabile Numcn 
Fortasse expei 

1 denounces as "three men of sin M the princes 
that had been concerned in ousting Prospero from his 
dukedom, and whom a tempest had now wrecked on 

nd thus that delicate spirit enfor 
the moral of his remind. 

ibei 

(For that's my business to you) that you tl u 



468 SENTENCE PASSED, EXECUTION DEFERRED. 

From Milan did supplant good Prospero, 
Exposed unto the sea, which hath requit it, 
Him, and his innocent child ; for which fond deed, 
The Powers, delaying, not forgetting, have 
Incensed the sea and shores, yea, all the creatures, 
Against your peace." 

That moral laws do not work with the same rapidity 
as material laws, is a proposition discussed by Principal 
Caird, who suggests ethical reasons why the sequence of 
cause and effect is not equally rapid in the moral as in 
the physical world, and why every act of sin is not 
followed by an immediate penalty — why the hand that 
had just committed a ruthless act is not instantly struck 
palsied by the side, and why the remorse that sometimes 
attends a course of guilt, comes after a long interval, or 
settles down on the spirit at the close of life in gradually 
darkening, deepening horror, instead of being the im- 
mediate and universal consequence of sin. 

" O Heavenly Justice ! if thou be delayed, 
On wretched sinners sharper falls thy rod," 

exclaims Tasso, or rather Fairfax for him. The delay 
is anything but a guaranty of impunity or oblivion : 

'AAA' ov, rav Albs auTpcnrav 
Kcu rav ovpavlav Qep.iv, 
Aapov yap ovk anoivrjTOi, 

as the Chorus in the Electra is persuaded. The law's 
delay, in human tribunals, is a byword. The courts 
move too slow, by the testimony of the Old Judge him- 
self. He cites the words from the bench of a fellow 
judge, who, sentencing a man for murder, told him that 
sooner or later punishment is sure to overtake the guilty: 
" the law moves slow, but it is sure and certain. Justice 
has been represented with a heel of lead, from its slow 
and measured pace, but its hand is a hand of iron, and 
its blow is death.-" An irreverent New Englander calls 



LAGGARD RETRIBUTIOX. 469 

it a " funny sort o' figure of justice, that ; when it's so 
plaguy heavy-heeled most any one can outrun it ; and 
when its great iron fist strikes so uncommon slow, a 
chap that's any way spry is e'en a'most sure to give it 
the dodge." When the old clerk Sampson Wilmot says 
he's an old man, and has seen a good deal of the ways 
of this world, and has found that retribution seldom fails 
to overtake those who do wrong, Mr. Balderby shrugs 
his shoulder and doubts the force of that philosophy in 
the case of the prosperous wrongdoer whose career they 
arc criticizing, — so long an immunity has the latter en- 
joyed : " I should scarce think it likely he would ever be 
called upon to atone " for his sins now. " I don't know, 
sir," rejoins the other ; " I've seen retribution come very 
late ; when the man who committed the sin had well- 
nigh forgotten it." To adapt the style of Octavio 
Piccolomini in Schiller, 

" With light tread stole he on his evil way, 
And light of tread hath Vengeance stolen on him. 
Unseen she stands already, dark behind him — 
Dut one step more — he shudders in her grasp !"' 

A paragraph of Mr. Fronde's first volume sounds the 
alarm of the time of reckoning fur a national evil having 
at length arrived: slowly, as he traces it, the hand had 
crawled along the dial plate ; slowly as if the event 
lid never come ; and wrong was heaped on wrong ; 
and oppression cried, and it seemed as if no ear heard 

•; till the measure of the circle was at leu 

fulfilled, the finger touched the hour, and "as tin- great 
hammer rang out above the nation, in an instant the 
mighty fabric of iniquity was shivered into ruins." As 

with nations and institutions, so, or rather much more 
ly and signally for the most part, with individual 

tran 1 monitor}- voice in the Sea Voyage of 

Beaumont and Fletcher enforces the reminder — 



47o A TAINT OF FOLLY IN THE WISE. 

" Vengeance, though slow-paced, 
At length o'ertakes the guilty ; and the wrath 
Of the incensed Powers will fall most sure 
On wicked men when they are most secure ." 



XLII. 

A TAINT OF FOLLY LN THE WISE. 

ECCLESIASTES X. I. 

DEAD flies, saith the Preacher, cause the ointment 
of the apothecary to send forth a stinking flavour ; 
and even " so doth a little folly him that is in reputation 
for wisdom and honour." The follies of the wise are 
proverbial, as coupled with fears of the brave, in John- 
son's sonorous line. Byron takes leave to conjecture 
that if the follies of fools were all set down like those 
of the wise, the wise (who seem at present only a better 
sort of fools) would appear almost intelligent. Be that 
as it may, there is nothing so absurd but what it may 
have been said by some philosopher, as Cicero assures 
us : nihil tam absurdum dici potest ut non dicaticr a 
philosopho. It was a favourite saw of Scott's, that the 
wisest of our race often reserve the average stock of 
folly to be all expended upon some one flagrant absurd- 
ity. Dr. Croly moralizes on the frivolities which so 
often make the world stare at the latter years of famous 
men, when, following their own tastes, as he puts it, and 
scorning the little opinions of commonplace mankind, 
they "contemptuously trifle, and proudly play the fool." 
Goldsmith's citizen of the world is for admiring the 
wisdom of the wise man, and leaving the ignorant and 
the envious to ridicule his foibles : " the folly of others 
is ever more ridiculous to those who are themselves 
most foolish." As Beranger sings, 



FOLLIES OF THE V IBLES OF THE GRL «n 

La folie attache un g^dot." 

Or again, ai re has it 

admirable, que tous les grands hommes ont toujours 
quelque petit grain de folie mele a leur science." Moli 
himself. UnU rhilosoplu qu il t'tait (TailUiirs, incurred at 
home the ridicule he had so often exposed on the stage. 
- good, said Macau! ay, to be often reminded of the 
:ency of human nature, and to learn to look 
nier or d ich are 

to be found in the r minds : Diony in- 

ce, in old times. an<J Frederick in the last cent, 
h capacity and vigour equal to the conduct of the 
greatest affairs, united all the little vanities and 
tions of provincial blue-stockings. Philosopher- 
us there is no limit to the absurdity of the guises which 
::iake a man ready to put on : the affectation 
of clever people has become a proverb. " A great poet 
or a great I ay be found to divide the palm of 

the emptiest little miss in the room." 
enough, foibles and faults and 
are the favour:. res of aifected p. 

end to be in bad he. 
and adopt a silly lis n much more con- 

*eak plain, and resort to tricks of gait or 
d the tricks are a downright trouble to th e 
the men and women who are most guilty of thes 
being more ho might r mst 

to their real character k>r esteem and admiration. "The 

ns derive from 
flf as great fools, must be one of the a 
curious in the whole : ot human joys." But 

the follies of th 

tior .an the author of 

rous line which has made "follies of tru 



472 FOLLIES OF THE WISE: JOHNSON, LUTHER, 

proverbial, — Dr. Johnson, — it might not be easy to name ; 
and Johnson it is that Lord Macaulay ridicules for his 
"childish prejudices" and superstition, under the spell of 
which, as if smitten by enchantment, his mind would 
dwindle away from gigantic elevation to dwarfish little- 
ness ; so that listeners who had just been admiring 
its amplitude and its force, were now as much astonished 
at its strange narrowness and feebleness as the fisherman 
in the Arabian tale, when he " saw the Genie, whose 
stature had overshadowed the whole sea-coast, and 
whose might seemed equal to a contest with armies, 
contract himself to the dimensions of his small prison, 
and lie there the helpless slave of the charm of Solomon." 
One is reminded of what an apologist for Luther sees 
in the mental phantasmagoria of so illustrious a man — 
viz., an exhibition to which no one who reveres his name 
would needlessly direct an unfriendly or an idle gaze. 
The very infirmites of our nature are said often to afford 
the best measure of its strength. When succeeding 
ages and different climes have agreed in affirming that 
tel homme etait grand ; then, as M. de Barante contends, 
" en vain epluchez-vous des anecdotes qui nous le mon- 
trent rempli de petitesses : cela se peut, mais il etait 
grand/'' for a' that, and a' that, and twice as much as a' 
that. " Wisest men have erred/'' chant the Chorus in 
Samson Agonistes, " and shall again, pretend they ne'er 
so wise." Fools and wise men, it has been said, are not 
two separate nations, with a sea rolling between them, 
but two neighbours each of a common border-land ; 
and in this border-land are many whose nationality it is 
sometimes hard to decide upon. 

With all his admiration for the Emperor Julian, Gibbon 
speaks of his waking visions, induced by abstinence and 
fanaticism, as almost degrading him to the level of an 
Egyptian monk. The maxim Nullum magnum ingenium 



^IER, RALEIGH. RICHEU2. 

sirtc declared by Bayle not to include 

Cardan ova the folly, h; is improved by 

talent, not the talent marred by (o\. — : the 

first class though Cardan be. The "sublime genius. 
Scott deems it. 01 Napier of Merchiston, had its weak 
points: like Newton, he wasted time on guesses at 
prophe: : recon~ The eminent en- 

gra. am Sharp, though in the ordinary transac- 

tions of life a man of shrewdr. notoriously, in 

matters of science and religion, a visionary and an enthu- 
: — no imposture being too gross for his belief, and 
no evidenc. ng to disabuse his mind: 

the doctrines of Mesmer, the rhapsoc Richard 

Brothers, and the extravagances of Johanna Southcott, 
jrn found in him a warm disciple; and, in the last 
case, as his biographers prove, an easy and liberal dupe. 
The dream of Sir Walter Raleigh concerning the golden 
and c. f Eldorado, satisfies Adam Smith 

that -.vise men are not a! .mpt from such 

strange de'.~ 

If we read of Cardinal Richelieu one day as guiding 
the sword of Gusta ming the Romish reaction, 

founding the absolute monarchy of France ; the i 
day, he figures as on a leve xx>r Dr. Goldsmith, 

when nted to exhibit his agility in jump:: 

Against a shown : — for did not the 

Cardinal dance a saraband in the boudoir of Mary of 
a hand, and in Andalu 
:.g wholesale went on behind the arras ? La 
Bruyere has a rap at the sort of wiseacres who 
Phi* litil a:: But S .nc- 

ing, and R 

k the I ..en thir » at the 

worst with him, could find amusement in composing an 
ode, at once feeble and profane (as Earl Stanhope calls 



474 A TAINT OF FOLLY IN THE WISE. 

it), against the Duke of Cumberland ; and still feebler, 
still coarser, were the French rhymes in which, the very 
day after the battle of Rosbach, the illustrious victor 
took leave of the French army. " Alas, for human 
intellect to find even its glory thus blended with its 
shame ! " Lord Brougham finds a strange contrast to 
the vigorous and daring policy of Catharine of Russia, 
in the " ebullitions of childish vanity" that so whimsi- 
cally found vent in fantastic display and grotesque 
caprice. Lord Clive was the wonder of some of his 
friends when, in his busiest time, the year of Plassey, 
he could find leisure to hesitate and vacillate between 
two kinds of court suits, and be so particular in instruct- 
ing his friend Mr. Orme, the historian, to send him " two 
hundred shirts, the best and finest you can get for love 
or money ; some of the ruffles worked with a border 
either in squares or points, and the rest plain." Men 
who smile over the quarrels of governments and kings, 
will perhaps squabble frantically over a fossil bone, as a 
shrewd writer observes, who is of opinion, indeed, that 
although intellectual pursuits have an unquestionable 
tendency to elevate the mind, their effect is not uni- 
versal ; for if some of the most intellectual men have 
been among the noblest, many have been among the 
meanest of mankind. 

The Preacher's text is thus paraphrased by Prior : 

" Oft have I said, the praise of doing well 
Is to the ear as ointment to the smell. 
Now, if some flies perchance, however small, 
Into the alabaster urn should fall, 
The odours of the sweets inclosed would die ; 
And stench corrupt, sad change, their place supply. 
So the least faults, if mixed with fairest deed, 
Of future ill become the fatal seed ; 
Into the balm of purest virtue cast, 
Annoy all life with one contagious blast." 



SPORTIVEXESS IN THE GREAT. 

But there are lighter aspects and applications of the 
theme, to which something of tolerant mention may 
here be due. 

The sportive element in great men is often so signally 
developed, that if all sportiveness be foil}-, some of 
them must be reckoned very foolish indeed. What 
most takes Mr. Emerson's fancy in the heroic class, is 
their hilarity. Sport he pronounces to be the bloom 
and glow of a perfect health. Mr. Motley is careful to 
tell us how merry William the Silent was at table — 
naturally jocose, and studiously so too. His apparent 
gaiety at momentous epochs, even in the darkest hours 
of his country's trial, was " censured by dullards, who 
could not comprehend its philosophy, nor applaud the 
flippancy " of the Prince of Orange. All the dearer to 
^ne was the memory of Socrates, for that the 
old man eloquent never refused to play at cob-nut, or 
- the hobby-horse with the boys. With most men 
who have risen to eminence there has been observed an 
aptness, at times, to a wild mirth and an elasticity of 
humour which often astonish those more .^ : its, 

u the commoners of life." Cromwell would break off 
from th t and most pressing disc .at the 

:al of an accidental jest, and romp like a boy — 
throwing about the cushions, pulling hair, and having 
a chase round the council table. The: 
his suddenly breaking off from a pathetic colloquy with 
Lord Orrery, on the subject of childhood, which had 
brought tlu their ey him if he could 

play at leap-frog, and of their a p or 

on the spot, — hi be went 

noble lord, to dig his knuckles in his back, and 
make hii . under the transit Cromwell's alterna- 

tion of austerity with un ible buffoonery is noted 



476 SPORTIVE STATESMEN AND DIVINES. 

by one of Rienzi's admirers, as paralleled in the case of 
that adventurous tribune. " He was a wise pope," says 
John Selden of that Holy Father who, when one that 
used to be merry with him before he was advanced to 
the popedom, refrained afterwards from coming to him, 
presuming him to be absorbed in governing the Christian 
world, — sent for his old associate, and insisted on being 
as merry as aforetime, if only to show the part foolery 
has in governing the world. 

Samples of the sportive are not far to seek in any 
direction. Erskine's humour, according to Lord 
Brougham, was playful to buoyancy, and wild even to 
extravagance. Curran, when turned of sixty, was as 
playful as a child. Stately John Kemble could not 
resist joining some chimney sweeps in Park Lane in 
playing at marbles ; and great was the veteran's glee to 
find he was still a master hand at taw — which he de- 
clared to be the best thing he " played." Leigh Hunt 
delights in describing Byron riding on his little boy's 
rocking-horse, "with a childish glee becoming a poet. 
Ah ! why did he ever ride his Pegasus to less ad- 
vantage ? " Crabb Robinson bears record in his Diary 
(1813), that "Flaxman, of all the great men I ever knew, 
plays the child with the most grace." In the case of 
Robert Story, of Rosneath, his biographer observes 
that many, no doubt, would be inclined to question the 
stability and depth of religious principle and feeling, 
which could co-exist with such real and hearty enjoy- 
ment as he had in any joke, or whim, or ludicrous esca- 
pade. " But the living, devoted piety of the man was 
as sincere as his delight in wit and laughter and what, 
perhaps, some staid people would call ' torn-foolery,' 
was genuine." * Archdeacon Hare somewhere says 

* Memoir of the Rev. Robert Story, p. 97. 



LOVERS OF HEARTY XOXSEXSE. \J7 

that sense must be very good indeed, to be as good as 
good nonsense. About what constitutes goodness of 
that kind, tastes will ever differ ; but the absolute relish 
of some sort of nonsense by all sorts of distinguished 
men, is manifest enough, in all sorts of manifestations. 
Hazlitt used to contend that the English are almost the 
only people who understand and relish nonsense. We 
are not merry and wise, he said, but indulge our mirth 
to excess and folly : when we trifle, we trifle in good 
earnest ; and, having once relaxed our hold of the helm, 
drift idly down the stream. "All we then want is to 
proclaim a truce with reason, and to be pleased with as 
little expense of thought or pretension to wisdom as 
possible.-" Jack of Dover, whose Privie Search for the 
Veriest Foolc in England (1604) the Percy Society has 
reprinted, is applauded in Gryll Grange as one who 
looked for excellent fooling, such as under the semblance 
of folly was both merry and wise : he did not look for 
mere unmixed folly, of which there was never a defici- 
ency ; the fool he looked for was one which it takes a 
wise man to make — a Shakspearian fool. Hogarth, as 
one of the members of the celebrated Nonsense Club, 
was singularly fond of elaborate drolleries. Horace 
Walpole, a sufficient contrast, in some of his letters 
avowedly "set down the first thing that came into" his 
head, for, "in truth, I have a little partiality for non- 
sense." When Johnson, in the imaginary conversation, 
1 Home Tooke "don't play the fool," — "Alas ! it is 
the only game I have ever learnt to play," rejoins the 
latter, "but I dislike to play it single-handed. Come 

along, Doctor!" The Doctor, — Southey's,— -quotes 
lumont and Fletcher, in answer to the exclamatory 

" More fooling !" of Dr. He: 1 . 

u But do you know what fooling is? true fooling, — 

The circumstances that belong unto it ? 



473 CORDIAL LOVERS OF NONSENSE: 

For every idle knave that shows his teeth . . . 
Is not a fool at first dash." 

It is easy, the Doctor adds, to talk of fooling and of 
folly, mais d'en savoir les ordres, les rangs, les distinc- 
tions ; de connoitre ces differences dedicates qu'il y a de 
Folie a Folie ; les afjinites et les alliances qui se trouvent 
entre la Sagesse et cette mane Folie, as Saint Evremond 
says — to know this is not under every one's nightcap. 
" Such facetiousness," says Barrow, " is not unreasonable 
or unlawful which ministereth harmless divertisement 
and delight to conversation ; harmless, I say, that is, 
not entrenching upon piety, not infringing charity or 
justice, not disturbing peace." As the mists of moody 
sadness rolled away from Luther's " robust mind," it 
yielded itself to an enjoyment of what Sir James 
Stephen calls the broad humour, the " glorious profusion 
of sense and nonsense," which characterized Doctor 
Martin's hours of relaxation. Saint Francis of Assisi 
figures in hagiology as given to jocularities of the kind 
usually distinguished as practical ; these, if not emi- 
nently ludicrous, are owned to have been, at least, very 
practical jests. Of Xavier, again, we read that his was 
a sanctity which, at fitting seasons, in loco, could disport 
itself, desipere, in jests and trifling. There is in all real 
genius, said a late author, so much latent playfulness of 
nature, it almost seems as if genius never could grow 
old. Bien drole, bien bnffon, this, with or without genius, 
Voltaire essayed and managed to be ; and the buffoonery 
went on increasing with age, and not getting any the 
lovelier for it. If the Abbe Galiani is justly accredited 
with grand thoughts, lofty enough, sublime enough, to 
be worthy of Vico, if not of Plato, quite as unquestion- 
able is his reputation for an abrupt resort to puns and 
buffooneries and unbridled nonsense. 

What Burns professedly most valued in such a friend 



SYDNEY SMITH, LAMB, DE OUIXCEY, SOUTHEY. 479 

as he had in Robert Anslie, was, that he could talk 
nonsense to him without forfeiting any degree' of his 
esteem ; and fervently he expressed his trust that his 
Christian namesake, though " not such a hopeless fool 
as I/ J would never "grow so very wise that you will in 
the least disrespect an honest fellow because he is " con- 
stitutionally given to fooling. Moore records of Sydney 
Smith, " He never minds what nonsense he talks, which 
is one of the great reasons of his saying so much that 
is comical. " If we knew nothing of Klia but his All 
Fools Day, we should be well assured of the degree of 
dulce he found in desipiendo. Of him personally, however 
Mr. de Ouincey bears witness, " Both Lamb and my- 
self had a furious love for nonsense, headlong nonsense. 
Excepting Professor Wilson and myself, I have known 
nobody who had the same passion to the same extent." 
Southey would perhaps have resented his exclusion from 
this first class of graduates, or masters of arts, in se- 
lect admirable fooling, — to judge at least by his perti- 
naciously pronounced relish for it, in his correspondence 
at 1. rly and late, with women as with men, with 

old as with young. His "right to talk nonsense "was 
very dear to him, and jealously he enforced it, sometimes 
with riotous ostentation and aggressiveness. Almost 
piteous is his lament to his old friend Grosvenor Bedford, 
that "two men who love nonsense so cordially, and 
naturally, and bondfidically t as you and I, should be 300 
miles asunder. For my part I insist upon it that there 
is v. ood as your honest genuine non sen 

What-. —bishop's, sp , chancellor's, — so 

pectable a covering for tin- head as the cap and bells? 
an elderly man, he thanked Heaven that he retained 
hildish tastes ; in- lik< I berry pi< 

well r of old, and he was very ready to play the 

fool wherever he felt himself sufficiently at home. 



480 HEALTHY FUN AND NOXIOUS LEVITY. 

We find the late Bishop Lonsdale writing of the ex- 
Principal of Haylebury College, who was then not far 
from eighty, " It is very pleasant to find that Le Bas 
has not lost his fun, but is still, not kicking, but pranc- 
ing, as playfully as ever. I have a real respect for him." 
The Bishop himself, at the same age, might have been 
described in the same words. He once astonished a 
young curate by exclaiming to the Master of the 
Temple, in that plaintive tone of his which gave pi- 
quancy to his humour, "Oh, Robinson, they have no such 
fun at Cambridge now as we had." M. Guizot is careful 
to let us know of Casimir Perier, that cold and distant 
as he was to outsiders, at home he was lively and 
humorous, amusing himself with a thousand " puerilities 
of social life " such as are " despised at present when 
the affectation of solemnity is the prevailing fashion of 
the mind." But then fashions change, and so fast ! 

Whatever is good and virtuous may be, on Seneca's 
showing, obscured, practically " extinguished," by levity, 
properly so called. Quicquid est boni moris levitate ex- 
tinguitur. It is the dead fly in the ointment. Discre- 
tion is honoured by Addison as the quality which gives 
a value to all the rest, and without which, learning is 
pedantry and wit impertinence ; virtue itself looks like 
weakness ; and the best parts only qualify a man to be 
more sprightly in errors, and active to his own prejudice. 
Of world-wide interpretation and significance is the 
allegory told of the Duke of Orleans, that all the gifts 
and graces heaped upon him by the fairies invited to 
his christening, were cancelled by the provision of the 
fairy who was not invited, that he should be unable to 
turn them to account. The homely phrase about this or 
that dullard having had a rock too much in his cradle, 
is commended by Shenstone as a most expressive idiom 



MARRED BY OXE DEFAULT. \%\ 

to describe a dislocated understanding ; an understand- 
ing, for instance, which, like a watch, discovers a multi- 
tude of parts betokening a designed system of perfection ; 
yet which, by some unlucky jumble, falls infinitely short 
of it. Macaulay said of Petrarch, that Nature meant 
him to be the prince of lyric writers, but by one fatal 
present deprived her other gifts of half their value : he 
would have been a much greater poet had he been a 
less clever man : his ingenuity was the bane of his mind. 
On the other hand, Goethe makes his Tasso lament, in 
the instance of Antonio, that 

u When round his cradle all the gods assembled 
To bring their gifts, the Graces were not there ; 
And he who lacks what these fair powers impart, 
May much possess, and much communicate," 

but is a defaulter whose one thing lacking is a parlous 
want indeed. Fiction delights in tracing instances of 
some such radical deficiency. Lord Lytton's Margrave 
is seen to be wanting in that mysterious something 
which is needed to keep onr faculties, however severally 
brilliant, harmoniously linked together. The Mrs. 
Pembroke of the Canterbury Tales, lovely in person, 
accomplished, and sensible, with a benevolence of nature 
that made her to every one she thought inferior to 
herself a ministering angel, has the fatal foible of absurd 
ptibility t>> her "rights" in society, which become 
at last the only subject of her conversation, the unre- 
mittin of domestic contention and rage. The 

Philip I liffe of Mrs. Edwardes' early story, excel- 

lent of In art, and sensitively regardful <>f honour, lives 

hted life because his will is weak, his resolutions 

wavering, [f the head be giddy, says one of our old 
divines, it is not the absolute entire perfection <>f all the 

<»ther parts "f the bod)', that can Mill": ilate and 

direct so much as any one action of life. "The whole 

I l 



482 GREAT POWERS AND FINE QUALITIES 

tenour of a man's behaviour in this case is like the 
motion of a watch that has a fault in the spring ; he is 
rendered utterly useless, as to all great and considerable 
purposes." Constantly in critical notices of more or 
less eminent statesmen, we come across regretful remarks 
on the degree of eminence they missed, from some one 
thing wanting. Count M0I6, says a foreign reviewer, 
would have been a first-rate statesman, but for his want 
of perseverance. Romilly deplored in Brougham a want 
of judgment and prudence that went far to foil his 
splendid talents. The late Sir James Graham, "with 
talents almost unequalled," was referred to as a striking 
proof of the utter insufficiency in England of any in- 
tellectual qualifications to recommend a man who is not 
believed to be sincere. Admirers of M. Victor Hugo 
are earnest in their expressions of regret, in the interests 
of poetic art, that a man gifted as he has been should 
have spoiled so much work by mere incapacity to act as 
his own critic : what a magnificent artist, they exclaim, 
he might have been, if, to all his other gifts, the pro- 
digality of nature had added temperance and sanity. 
Wanting which, he is, by the judicious, when weighed 
in the balance, found wanting indeed. 

We pass on to glance here and there at a salient 
example, or warning, of a life marred, foiled, or enfeebled 
by the taint of some one vice, foible, demerit, or defect. 
A licentious passion was the fatal flaw to what Gibbon 
calls the " shining accomplishments," of Victorinus. 
Base subserviency to his infamous wife degraded the 
else noble and attractive character of Belisarius. 

" Not one line in the horoscope of Time 
Is perfect. Oh, what falling off is this, 
When some grand soul, that else had been sublime, 
Falls heedlessly amiss, 
And stoops its crested strength," 



MARRED BY OXE RADICAL DEFECT. 4S3 

as he did. All the brilliant qualities of Maximilian I. 
were marred by his levity of character. All the good 
qualities of the great, or at any rate the greatest, Earl 
of Essex were rendered useless to his country, and even 
dangerous to his friends, by his overweening vanity and 
ambition. Joanna Baillie designed to represent in De 
Montfort a man whose fine qualities were neutralized by 
one dark passion — 

" Who, but for one dark passion, . . . 
Had claimed a record of as noble worth 
As e'er enriched the sculptured pedestal." 

The Earl of Leicester writes home from Flanders, of 
Count Hollock, that he " is a wise gallant gentleman, 
and very well esteemed. He hath only one fault, which 
is drinking . . . and this fault overthrows all." 
One of the admirers of Count Konigsegg affirmed of 
him, that he wanted only an additional grain of salt in 
his composition, to be one of the greatest men of his 
age ; and the more critical allowed the affirmation to be 
just. What the exact want might be, they would per- 
haps have differed about, or would have indefinitely 
defined it after the manner of Sir Joshua Reynolds, when 
criticizing a certain picture as a capital composition ; 
the drawing correct, the colour, tone, chiaroscuro excel- 
lent ; "but — but — it wants, hang it, it wants — Thai I 91 
snapping his finger ; and, wanting " that," though it 
had all besides, it was a provoking failure. 

It was said of Catharine II. of Russia, coarsely but 
truly, that she would have been great indeed but for the 
excess of two qualities, — the love of man, and the l<»ve 
of glory. Wedderburn (Lord Loughborough) would 
have been upon the whole a great man, were it possible 
to be so without some share of public virtue; and of 
that he had none Swift said of Doctor Sheridan, that, 
generous, hones" and good-natured as he was, his per- 



484 MARRED BY ONE DEFECT. 

petual want of discretion made him act as if he were 
neither generous, honest, nor good-natured ; and of 
Richard Brinsley the complaint of his heartiest ad- 
mirers was, that indolence marred from the first what 
might have been so splendid a career. The judgment 
of Alceste is of wide application : 

" Qu'il ne faut que ce faible a decrier un homme ; 
Et qu'eut-on d'autre part cent belles qualites, 
On regarde les gens par leurs mechants cotes." 

Of Porson it has been said, that, but for one vice, he 
would have earned and retained a name, both in litera- 
ture and life, as spotless and venerable as that of Casau- 
bon or Melanchthon. Though, in a life of no long 
duration, he achieved much, yet he fell far short of the 
prize of his high calling. One vice in him was "a just 
equinox to his virtue." Helas ! as Balzac sighs it over 
one of his characters : toutes ces belles qualites etaient 
ternis par un epouvantable vice. George Herbert's sum 
of blessings, privileges, endowments, closes with the sad 
couplet — 

" Yet all these fences and their whole array- 
One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away." 

■ag. jfa -v.. .afr «a& 

•7P W W W w 

Pope's Chloe is marred to the uttermost by one thing 
wanting ; wanting which, what avail her other perfec- 
tions, such as they are ? 

" ' Yet Chloe sure was found without a spot.' 
Nature in her then erred not, but forgot. 
1 With every pleasing, every prudent part, 
Say, what can Chloe want ? ' — She wants a heart." 

Shakspeare's Ferdinand in the Tempest, professes to have 
liked several women, yet never any with so full soul, but 
some defect in her did quarrel with the noblest grace 
she owned, and put it to the foil. His Sir Proteus pro- 
tests that were man 



CASTIXG BREAD UPON THE WATERS. 4S5 

" But constant, he were perfect : this one error 
Fills him with faults ; makes him run through all sins." 

His Hotspur is rebuked by Worcester for giving way to 
a petulance such as, "haunting a nobleman, loseth men's 
hearts ; and leaves behind a stain upon the beauty of 
all parts besides, beguiling them of commendation.'" 
But the passage in Shakspeare most, perhaps, to the 
purpose, — especially with regard to the closing lines,*as 
suggestive of the Scripture simile of dead flies in oint- 
ment, — Is that in which Hamlet philosophizes on the 
fact, that oft it chances in particular men, that, for some 
vicious mode of nature in them, or by some cherished 
habit, 

" that these men, — 

Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect ; 
Being nature's livery, or fortune's star, — 
Their virtues else (be they as pure as grace, 
As infinite as man may undergo), 
Shall in the general censure take corruption 
From that particular fault : The dram of base 
Doth all the noble substance often dout, 
To his own scandaL" 



XLIII. 
CASTING BREAD UPON THE WATERS. 

ECCLESIASTES xi. 1. 

THE promise that bread cast upon the waters, that 
■ >wn broadcast by the sower beside all waters, 
even upon them when the floods are high, shall be found 
after many days, is from Him that elsewhere hath de- 

';. th.it as the rain conuth down, and the snow, 

from heaven, and rettirneth not thither, but watereth the 
earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may 

give seed to the sower and bread to the eater ; so shall 



486 SEED-CORN CAST UPON THE WATERS: 

His word be that goeth forth out of His mouth ; it shall 
' not return unto Him void ; but it shall accomplish that 
which He pleaseth, and it shall prosper in the thing 
whereto He sent it. And " blessed are they that sow 
beside all waters, that send forth thither the feet of the 
ox and the ass. " He that observeth the wind shall not 
sow ; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap." 
Sky-gazing is not work, and to be over weather-wise is 
the reverse of wisdom. Therefore, " In the morning sow 
thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thy hand, for 
thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or 
that, or whether they both shall be alike good." The 
harvest may be late. Though it tarry, wait for it. The 
seed may not yield its increase for awhile, till the floods 
abate and the dry land re-appears ; but thou shalt find 
it after many days. 

We may apply the suggestive and finely expressed 
lines of Wordsworth : 

" And when the stream 
Which overflowed the soul was passed away, 
A consciousness remained that it had left, 
Deposited upon the silent shore 
Of memory, images and precious thoughts, 
That shall not die, and cannot be destroyed." 

Non colit arva bene, qui semen mandat arena, says the 
mediaeval proverb ; but between the sands of this saw, 
and the waters of the text, there is a (literally) substan- 
tial difference — the substratum of a submerged but 
fertile and finally remunerative soil. Jeremy Taylor 
finely speaks of agencies and results which though to 
us they are like water spilt, yet to God are " as water 
fallen into the sea, and united in His comprehension 
and enclosures." It is a loyal faith in such assurances 
that enables a worker to comply with the injunction to 
be stedfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of 



HARVEST AFTER MANY DA VS. 4S7 

the Lord, forasmuch as he knows that his labour is not 
in vain in the Lord. 

We read of Julia Dodd, in Mr. C Reade's matter-of- 
fact romance, that she diligently visited the wretched 
Barkington, gave him good books, read to him, and 
" ploughed his heart with her sweet voice, and sowed the 
good seed in the furrows — seed which, like wheat or 
other grain, often seems to fall flat and die, but comes 
out green after many days." Cooper's Deerslayer 
edified by the earnestness of simple Hetty's account o: 
her interview with the Red Indians in their camp, she, 
as usual, with her Bible in her hand : " When I read the 
texts to the chiefs, you could not have seen that they 
made any changes on their minds ; but if seed is planted 
it icill grow. God planted the seeds of all the trees — ," 
" Ay that did He, that did He," muttered Deerslayer ; 
"and a goodly harvest has followed/' "God planted 
the seeds of all the trees," continued Hetty, after a 
moment's pause, "and you see to what a height and 
shade the)' have grown ! So it is with the Bible. You 
may read averse this year, and forget it, and it will come 
back to you a year hence, when you least expect to 
remember it." There is a simile in the laureate's Golden 

" As if the seedsman, rapt 

Upon the teeming harvest, should not dip, 
His hand into the bag : but well I kn<>w 

That unto him who works, and feels he works, 

This same grand year is ever at the di 

The text of bread upon the watt : :i fre- 

quent use with Coleridge, who, in the Aids to Reflectum^ 

for instance, referred to the contradistinction of the 

understanding from reason as a point for which during 

twent] with a perseverance which nothing but the 

deepest conviction of its importance could have inspired, 



488 ALL WORK LS AS SEED SOWN. 

" I have been contending, ' casting my bread upon the 
waters.'" One discourse of his begins with a modest 
hypothesis of his finding a reader for it. " Should he 
exist only in my imagination, let the bread float on the 
waters ! If it be the Bread of Life, it will not have been 
utterly cast away/-' He would have said Amen in a 
deep voice to Arthur Hugh Clough's utterance of resig- 
nation, if not of patient hope, — 

" Others, I doubt not, if not we, 
The issue of our toils shall see ; 
Young children gather as their own 
The harvest that the dead had sown, 
The dead, forgotten and unknown." 

Blessed are the humble, are they that are not known, 
says Mr. Carlyle in the course of his description of Ra- 
heFs life as no idle one for herself or for others — so many 
souls may the "sparkles showering from that light- 
fountain " have kindled and illuminated ; whose " new 
virtue goes on propagating itself, increasing itself, under 
incalculable combinations, and will be found in far 
places, after many days." He considers it beautiful to 
see and understand that no worth, known or unknown, 
can die even in this earth. The work an unknown good 
man has done he likens to a vein of water flowing under 
ground, secretly making the ground green ; it flows and 
flows, it joins itself with other veins and veinlets ; one 
day, it will start forth as a visible perennial well. " No- 
thing dies, nothing can die. No idlest word thou speakest 
but is a seed cast into Time, and grows through all 
Eternity." Hence a momentous import in the resolve, 

" At least, not rotting like a weed, 
But, having sown some generous seed, 
Fruitful of further thought and deed," 

to pass, with the rest that are passing away, passing 
away. All work is as seed sown ; it "grows and spreads, 



NO GOOD WORK IS DOXE IX VAIN. 4S9 

and sows itself anew, and so, in endless palingenesia, 
lives and works." Good men, again to quote Mr. Car- 
lyle, are, by a bountiful Providence, sent hither to dis- 
seminate goodness ; literally to sow it, as in seeds shaken 
abroad by the living tree. " For such, in all ages and 
places, is the nature of a Good Man ; he is ever a mystic 
creative centre of Goodness : his influence, if we consider 
it, is not to be measured ; for his works do not die, but 
being of Eternity, are eternal ; and in new transforma- 
tion, and ever-wider diffusion, endure, living, and life- 
giving." No act of man, he insists, no thing, is 

inguished when it disappears ; he has known a 
done thing work visibly three thousand years and 
more ; invisibly, unrecognized, all done things work 
through endless times and years. " A man's little Work 
lies not isolated, stranded ; a whole busy World, a whole 
native-element of mysterious never-resting Force, envi- 
rons it ; will catch it up ; will carry it forward, or else 
backward ; always, infallibly, either as living growth, or 
at worst as well-rotted manure, the Thing Done will 
come into use." In God's world, contends Frederick 
Robertson, for those that are in earnest there is no 
failure : no work truly done — no word earnestly spoken 
— no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain. He 
lavs stress upon the power of indirect influences ; those 
which distil from a life, not from a sudden, brilliant 
effort. "There is good done of which we can never pre- 
dicate the when or where." We call the large majority 
of human lives obscure. " Presumptuous that we an 
exclaims Lord Lytton : " I low know we what Iivi 
single thought retained from the dust of nameles 
may have lighted to renown ? M He describes Genius 

tag an apprenticeship with some Richard Avenel, 

without as yet detecting "what good and what grandeur, 
what addition even to the true poetry of the social uni- 



49o EVERY GOOD DEED AND TRUE 

verse, fractional existences like Richard Avenel's be- 
stow." Each man of genius, though we never come 
across him, as his operations proceed, in places remote 
from our thoroughfare, is yet influencing the practical 
world that ignores him, for ever and ever. Not with the 
individual, as Dr. Thomas Brown puts it, perishes the 
influence ; nor when the world is deprived of those who 
have enlightened it, does it lose the illumination : — their 
wisdom, as it spreads from age to age, may be continually 
awaking some genius that would have slumbered but for 
them, and thus indirectly opening discoveries that, but 
for them, would have remained unrevealed. However 
untoward the immediate aspect of things may appear, 
the good man will know, says Julius Hare, that whenever 
he is labouring in the cause of heaven, the powers of 
heaven are working with him ; that, though the good he 
is aiming at may not be attainable in the very form he 
has in view, the ultimate result will assuredly be good ; 
that were man diligent in fulfilling his part, this result 
would be immediate ; and that no one who is thus dili- 
gent shall lose his precious reward, of seeing that every 
good deed is a part of the life of the world. " Courage ! 
courage ! " is Mrs. Browning's word to the wise : 

" The soul of a high intent, be it known, 
Can die no more than any soul 
Which God keeps by Him under the throne ; 
And this, at whatever interim, 
Shall live, and be consummated 
Into the being of deeds made whole." 

In vain the Princess Ida's counsellor urges, that her 

pains may only make that footprint upon sand which 

old-recurring waves of prejudice resmooth to nothing : 

" Let me tell you," she replies, 

" Howe'er you babble, great deeds cannot die : 
They with the sun and moon renew their light 
For ever, blessing those that look on them." 



IS A PART OF THE LIFE OF THE WORLD. 491 

Wherefore up and act, is her right royal summons, 
nor shrink for fear our solid aim be dissipated by frail 
successors. u Would, indeed, we had been, in lieu of 
many mortal flies, a race of giants, living, each, a 
thousand years, that we might see our own work out, 
and watch the sandy footprint harden into stone." But 
that may not be. Yet, as a younger poet phrases his 
benediction, 

' ; Blessed art thou, O man ! for thou growest 
(O thou lord of the thought and the hand !) 
In the growth of whatever thou doest, 
And the ages await thy command. 
* * * * 

Xo man's labour for good is in vain, 

Tho' he win, not the crown but the cross. 
Ever}' wish for man's good is a gain ; 
Ever)' doubt of man's gain is a loss." 

An historical critic says of Eckhart and the Mystics 
his fellow-workers, the only object of whose lives was 
the propagation of truth, that men of this stamp are 
sure to conquer the future ; that, little known as their 
names are at present, without their labours the Reformers 
would never have found a whole nation waiting to receive 
and ready to support them. lie recognizes in them what 
the Lollards were to England — spirits who were at work 
in the dark, and whose life passed away unobserved 
"They are persecutedi justly or unjustly— they suffer 
and die— and all they did seems to have been in vain." 
But suddenly we see their Work, long mailed as dangi r- 
in the .smooth current of society, rise above the sur- 
face like the coral-reefs in the Pacific, and it remains t >r 
centuries the firm foundation of a new world of thought 
and faith. In happier climes, and on a safer shore, the 

- promises the brave youth, with love of 

lie fired, who greatly in hi:, country's cause expired, 
thai he— 



492 NO MAN'S LABOUR FOR GOOD IS IN VAIN. 

" Shall know he conquered. The firm patriot there, 
Who made the welfare of mankind his care, 
Tho' still by faction, vice, and fortune crost, 
Shall find the generous labour was not lost." 

Later by some eighteen centuries fought and fell 
that " most unhappy man of men " whom, as a patriot, 
Wordsworth yet bade be of good cheer ; for, 

" Thou hast left behind 
Powers that will work for thee ; air, earth, and skies ; 
There's not a breathing of the common wind 
That will forget thee ; thou hast great allies ; 
Thy friends are exultations, agonies, 
And love, and man's unconquerable mind." 

Mr. Carlyle's sympathetic description of Friedrich 
Wilhelm trying that Julich-and-Berg Problem by the 
pacific method, all his life, strenuously, and without 
effect, omits not, by way of conclusion, the consolatory 
or compensatory reflection, that " Result perhaps was 
coming, nevertheless ; at the distance of another hundred 
years.'"' One thing the historian claims to know : what- 
ever rectitude and patience, whatever courage, perseve- 
rance, or other human virtue the king has put into this 
or another matter, is not lost ; nor is it, nor any fraction 
of it, to Friedrich Wilhelm and his sons' sons ; but " will 
well avail him and them, if not soon, then later, if not in 
Berg and Julich, then in some other quarter of the 
Universe, which is a wide Entity and a long-lived." 
Will Belton's homely motto is an approved one, that 
any good done in the world always pays. It is but a 
prosaic rendering of one phase of the poetical doctrine, 

" No stream from its source 
Flows seaward, how lonely soever its course, 
But what some land is gladdened. No star ever rose 
And set without influence somewhere. Who knows 
What earth needs from earth's lowest creature ? No life 
Can be pure in its purpose and strong in its strife 



SOWING BESIDE ALL WATERS. 493 

And all life not be purer and stronger thereby. 
The spirits of just men made perfect on high, 
The army of martyrs who stand by the Throne 
And gaze into the Face that makes glorious their own, 
Know this, surely, at last. Honest love, honest sorrow, 
Honest work for the day, honest hope for the morrow, 
Are these worth nothing more than the hand they make 
try ? . . ." 

As Romola walked, in plague-stricken Florence, often 
in weariness, among the sick, the hungry, and the mur- 
muring, she felt it good, we are told, to be inspired by 
something more than her pity — by the belief in a hero- 
ism struggling for sublime ends, towards which the daily 
action of her pity could only tend feebly, as the dews 
that freshen the weedy ground to-day tend to prepare 
an unseen harvest in the years to come. 

" Sow in the morn thy seed; at eve hold not thy hand ; 
To doubt and fear give thou no heed ; broadcast it o'er the land. 
Beside all waters sow ; the highway furrows stock ; 
Drop it where seeds and thistles grow ; scatter it on the rock. 
• ••••• 

Thou canst not toil in vain ; cold, heat, and moist, and dry, 
Shall foster and mature the grain for garners in the sky.'' 



XLIV. 

"PHYSICIAN^ HEAL THYSELF:' 
St. Luke Lv. 2}. 

HEBREW literature affords proof of the proverbial 
character of the sarcasm, " Physician, heal thy- 
self .And the 'Iarpe, 6ep(i7r€V(Toi' acduTur of St. Luke 

il correlatives in the Kan rpfc&vris 

Ischylus, and the &XXcov iar t j(^, K-.\., of Euripides. 

The application of the saying in the gospel is to those 

who show m< :r to >t; .inn to their own 

kith and kin ; as in Virgil's Hancfrimum tutaredomum 



494 'PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF: 

But we may here regard the proverb in its more obvious 
and most general sense, and " instance " it accordingly. 
The Jews appear to have but paraphrased it, to dreadful 
purpose, when they said, in the very hour and the power 
of darkness, when darkness was over the land, — said of 
One mighty to save, and then and there dying to save 
them and the like of them, "He saved others, Himself 
He cannot save." In other than a literal sense may 
they be said to have there and then given Him vinegar 
to drink, mingled with gall. 

In one of his familiar epistles to Rome's greatest 
orator, then dejected at the loss of Tullia, Sulpicius 
made this appeal : " Do not forget that you are Cicero ; 
one who has been used always to prescribe for and give 
advice to others ; do not imitate those paltry physicians 
who pretend to cure other people's diseases, yet are not 
able to cure their own ; but suggest rather to yourself 
the same lesson which you would give in the same 
case." Mali are the medici who ipsi se curare nonpossunt, 
after all and in spite of all their professional professings. 
^Esop's fable is perennially instructive, touching the 
Frog and the Fox — when, once upon a time, as time 
goes in fable and faerie, a Frog made proclamation to 
all the beasts of the forest and field, that he was the 
ablest of physicians for maladies all and sundry ; but 
was asked by the Fox how he dared, with those thin 
lantern jaws of his, and that pale meagre face, and that 
blotched spotted body, to set up for one who could 
cure the infirmities of others. So that expert in foxes 
rather than physicians, Crabbe's Gentleman-Farmer, 
who denounces the latter in mass as 

" — Grave impostors, who will health ensure 
Long as your patience or your wealth endure. 
But mark them well, the pale and sickly crew, 
They have not health, and can they give it you ?* 



DEATH AND THE DOCTORS. 495 

Among the epigrams, still admired for their neatness, 
of a Gascon poet of the seventeenth century, J. G. 
d' Astros,, is one upon a physician who died of a catarrh 
in seven hours : — 

" La Parque le voulut surprendre, 
Et je trouve quelle cut raison ; 
Car sans l'avoir par trahison, 
II eut pu d'elle se deTendre. 
Heias ! qui se croira plus fin 
Contre la mort qu'un medecin ?"' 

Dr. South asks in one of his sermons, adverting to the 
study of physic, Do not many shorten their days, and 
lose their own health, while they are learning to restore 
it to others? Do they not get consumptions amongst 
receipts and medicines, and die while they are convers- 
ing with remedies ? So Robert Blair takes his stand by 
The Grave, and says that 

u Here the great masters of the healing art, 
Those mighty mock defrauders of the tomb, 
Spite of their juleps and catholicons, 
Resign to fate. Proud yEsculapius' son, 
Where are thy boasted implements of art, 
And all thy well-crammed magazines of health ? 
* # * # 

Tell us, thou doughty keeper of the grave, 
Where are thy recipes and cordials now, 
With the long list of vouchers for thy cures ? 
Alas ! thou speakest not The bold impostor 
Looks not more silly, when the cheat's found out.'' 

The cur' »f Epitaph literature contain this pro- 

I and professional ipse dixit, or scripsit % of a medical 
Quack : — 

" I was a quack, and there are men who say 

That in my time I physicked lives away ; 

And that at length I by myself was slain 
With my own drugs, tak"n to relieve my pain. 
The truth is, being troubled with a cough, 
I, like a fool, consulted L>r. Gough, 



496 DOCTORS A T DINNER- TIME. 

Who physick'd me to death, at his own will, 
Because he's licensed by the State to kill. 
Had I but wisely taken my own physic, 
I never should have died of cold and 'tisick. 
So all be warn'd, and when you catch a cold, 
Go to my son, by whom my medicine's sold." 

The closing line breeds shrewd suspicion as to the 
proper authorship of this copy of verses. 

Readers of the Diary of the Rev. John Ward of Strat- 
ford upon Avon, may remember this entry : " There is 
a report of Hyppocrates, as if hee should say this in 
charge with physitians, that they should cure others 
with simples and compounds, and themselves with sack 
and claret."" Readers, — another class, or possibly the 
same, for both books are light reading, — of the Semi- 
detached House, may remember how good Mrs. Hopkin- 
son thinks she will take a hint about diet, by watching 
what Dr. Ayscough eats at her dinner-table : " You 
know he told us about Charlie, that all young meat, and 
pork, and raw vegetables, and sweet things, and pastry 
were bad ; and, my dear, he dined on veal cutlets and 
roast pork, salad, and jam tarts, and plum pudding. I 
suppose doctors cure themselves when they get home 
after they have dined out." An eminent medical 
practitioner is mentioned in The Doctor, who could not 
refrain from eating toasted cheese, though he was 
subject to an alarming pulmonary complaint which was 
uniformly aggravated by it, and which terminated 
fatally at an age by no means advanced. Southey's 
Doctor would have said he must have been previously 
either a mouse or a rat, and in that pre-existent form 
had nibbled at such a bait — perhaps once too often. 
The same authority cited the instance of a physician of 
his acquaintance, then living, who at an autumnal dessert 
never ceased eating all the filberts he could lay his 
hands upon, though very candidly acknowledging that 



PRECEPT VERSUS PRACTICE. 497 

they were exceedingly indigestible and hurtful things. 
On Daniel Dove's theory of pre-existence, this prac- 
titioner had been a squirrel, of course. 

Satirical Kit Anstey, discoursing of the medicinal 
repute of the Bath waters and bathing, could not resist 
this fling at the faculty : — 

u But, what is surprising, no mortal e'er view'd 
Any one of the physical gentlemen stew'd ; 
Since the day that King Bladud first found out these bogs, 
And thought them so good for himself and his hogs, 

t one of the faculty ever has tried 
These excellent waters to cure his own hide ; 
Though many a skilful and learned physician, 
With candour, good sense, and profound erudition, 
Obliges the world with the fruits of his brain, 
Their nature and hidden effects to explain. 
Thus Chiron advised Madame Thetis to take 
And dip her poor child in the Stygian lake, 
But the worthy old doctor was not such an elf 
As ever to venture his carcase himself." 

The Black Knight in Ivanhoe shrewdly took note 
that his hermit host, the Clerk of Copmanhurst, in set- 
ting an example of supping on the trencher of dried 
peas which, with a big can of water, constituted the 
evening repast, modestly put into a very large mouth, 
furnished with teeth which might have ranked with 
those of ;i boar both in sharpness and whiteness, some 
three or four of the peas, " a miserable grist as it seemed 
for so large and able a mill," and that, Lavish as was 
the reverend man's praise <>f the water from Si. Dun- 

Stan's well, yet, when he applied his black" beard to the 
pitcher, 1: a draught much more moderate in 

quantity than his encomium seemed to warrant. No 

wonder the knight told him that the small morsels he 

swallowed, together with the hoi; mewhat thin 

. mu x have thriven with him marvellously. 

But neither hi, physique nor his practice seemed in 

K k 



498 DINING- OUT DOCTORS. 

keeping with his precepts in favour of so ascetic a diet 
Hajji Baba in England records the doings of a dinner 
party which included a doctor, "evidently a man of 
great wisdom," to whom everybody lent a ready ear, for 
he gave a detailed and particular account of the nature 
of each dish at table : some he proscribed as totally 
forbidden ; others he barely allowed to be tasted ; there 
were about two which he said might lawfully be the 
food of man. " He, however, ate of every one himself." 
One of Theodore Hook's dining-out doctors is pictured 
"pegging away" at cold fowl, salmagundi, roasted 
oysters, and devilled turkey, for supper, despite all his 
previous tall talk about the unwholesomeness of supper 
in the abstract. " Well, Doctor," quoth a patient, " I see 
you do not exactly practise as you preach." " None 
of us do," is the reply. " When I was in town last, I 
dined with three physicians of the starving school, and 
two surgeons sworn to the Abernethian doctrine. I 
never saw five men eat or drink so much in the whole 
course of my life ; and go where you will, watch the 
faculty, and you will find them the greatest gormandizers 
in the empire." Another of the same author's medical 
representative men, this time a professor of homoeopathy, 
is watched by his involuntary host in the act of eating 
most ravenously of veal pie, ham, and salad, swallow- 
ing glass after glass of champagne, and munching pine- 
apples as if they were turnips, until at length the 
half-angry half-amused looker-on is moved to say, 
" Well, Doctor, how do you find this mode of training 
and feeding suit your own book ? I mean, how does it 
agree with yourself? " " Oh !" said Munx, " I — I don't 
attend to the rules myself: I have no constitutional dis- 
position to any particular disease." Mr. Trollope tells 
us of his Doctor Thorne in the matter of summer drinks, 
that he commonly disapproved of such things for his 



PRECEPT AXD PRACTICE. 499 

patients, as being apt to derange the digestion ; " but 
he consumed enough himself to throw a lar^e familv 
into such difficulties." Physicians are the object of 
Philemon's sarcasm in one of the jvco/iai of the Greek 
anthology : — 

eyxparfias toI? voaoiatv (v o-cpo&pa 
-if dr out TTTalcrox - 

- ' . ~ W0 0<T OIK litoll/ TOT( 

But the proverb invites to a larger than merely pro- 
.onal application. An historical critic, admit: 
that Periander's reputed maxims are at variance with 
his practice, whence a suspicion of their authenticity, 
submits however that the in acy would be 

natural, " for reason makes our opinions, and circum- 
stance shapes our actions."' Q ex- 
claims La Bruyere (if so calm a writer can be ever said 
to exclaim), enire Ttspr. xur! Le philosopht vit 
ma'. One of the things Zanoni 

that if it were necessary 
that practice square with precept, our monitors would be 
but few: the conduct of the individual, he mainta 
can affect few but a small circle beyond himself; the 
permanent good or evil that he work- zrs lies 

rather in the sentiments he " His acts are 

limited and momentary; his sentiments may ; 
the uni. till the 

doom. All our virtues, all our 

books and max . not fr 

dee: len, in his more- 

popular and practical v _r : " I'; 

Do as I : as I do. But if a physician fa 

the sam upon him that I have, and he should 

bid me do one thing, and he do <_ ther, could 

dieve hi: Such, remarks Bolingbroki 



500 PRECEPT AND PRACTICE. 

imperfection of human understanding, such the frail 
temper of our minds, that abstract or general propo- 
sitions, though ever so true, appear obscure or doubt- 
ful to us very often, till they are explained by examples ; 
and that the wisest lessons in favour of virtue go but a 
little way to convince the judgment and determine the 
will, unless they are enforced by the same means ; and 
we are obliged to apply to ourselves what we see happen 
to other men. Instructions by precept have the further 
disadvantage of coming on the authority of others, and 
frequently require a long deduction of reasoning. It is 
called the first rule in oratory, that a man must appear 
such as he would persuade others to be ; and that can 
only be effected by the force of his life. Churchill 
accounts it mighty easy o'er a glass of wine on vain 
refinements vainly to refine, — 

" And in each sentence, worthy of the schools, 
Varnish'd with sophistry, to deal out rules 
Most fit for practice, but for one poor fault, 
That into practice they can ne'er be brought." 

Philosophers, as Fielding says, are composed of flesh 
and blood as well as other human creatures ; and how- 
ever sublimated and refined the theory of these may be, 
a little practical frailty is as incident to them as to other 
mortals. It is indeed in theory only, and not in practice, 
that the difference is alleged to consist ; for though such 
great beings think much better and more wisely, they 
always act exactly like other men. They know very 
well, says their satirist, how to subdue all appetites and 
passions, and to despise both pain and pleasure ; and 
this knowledge affords much delightful contemplation, 
and is easily acquired. " But the practice would be 
vexatious and troublesome ; and therefore the same 
wisdom which teaches them to know this, teaches them 
to avoid carrying it into execution." There is a 






phil: f .7>_r in ir.:z'..s: :* Fi-.cir.g'i • )rks vvhc is 

re- 

- 

- what fa 

— 

I by 

- .ire tha: 

When 

all 

- 

the 

hen the 

j the p' be 

; of 

inJ. The | [ 

- 

know ■ hat : > good, but n it trally ; ursue -a 1: it > e\ il : th 2 

I 

jb- 



PRINCIPLES AXD PRACTICE. 



death/'' that as soon as his book was out, his sen-ant, 
''having read it, I presume," stole his watch, and the 
master, while correcting the proofs of a second edition, 
did all he could to have the man hanged. 

" For though to the strict letter of the law 
We bind our neighbours, yet, in our own cause, 
We give a large and liberal construction 
To its free spirit," 

quoth Rolando in Tobin. Boswell once heard Dr. John- 
son observe, " There is something noble in publishing 
truth, though it condemns one's self." And one who said 
in his presence, that he had no notion of people being in 
earnest in their good professions, whose practice was not 
suitable to them, was thus reprimanded by him : " Sir, 
are you so grossly ignorant of human nature as not to 
know that a man may be very sincere in good principles, 
without having good practice }" For all which, notwith- 
standing, Dr. Johnson would have been the last man to 
deny the force of example as compared or contrasted 
with precept; or the verity of Butler's teaching, that in 
the case of principles and practice, 

" No argument like matter of fact is ; 
And we are best of all led to 
Men's principles by what they do.'' 

The challenge in Juvenal is not always a safe one, 
Experiere Jwdie numquid pulcherrima dictu . . iio?i 
pr&stem vita, nee moribus, et re, etc. All too ironical is 
the Duke's eulogy of Angelo : 

" His life is parallel'd 

Even with the stroke and line of his great justice ; 
He doth with holy abstinence subdue 
That in himself, which he spurs on his power 
To qualify in others.'"' 

That austere lord deputy, with all his fair show in the 
flesh, of superiority to it, was no such perfect practitioner. 
Rather he was to be consigned to the category of those 



CAN THE BLIXD LEAD THE BLIXD? 

;'2lq\oms pastors" of whom Ophelia spoke, when she 
thanked Laertes for his excellent counsel, and hoped 
withal he would abide by it in his own life and con- 
versation : 

•• But, good my br : 

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, 
Show me the 5teep and thor: ^n ; 

i and reckless liber 
Himself the primrose path of da. is, 

And recks not his own read.* 7 



XLV. 

BLIXD-LED BLIXD. 
St. Luke vi. 39. 

OXE of our Lord's parables consists of two notes of 
interrogation. " Can the blind lead the blind ? 
Shall they not both fall into the ditch: M Ye blind 
gui ■'. 5 again and again His graphic denunciation 

of the Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, against whom, 
for their hypocrisy and for their wilful blindness, and 
for their blindfold misleading of the blind, His : 

an iteration of Woe upon Woe. The light of the 
body is the eye. If that eye be evil, the whole boci 
full of dark If therefore the light that is in thee 

be darkness, ha is that darkness!" If th 

thou follow. .hither mayest thou not be 

led astr 

that made the eye, shall He not s ad to 

1 alone,* in the first instance, and ti Ins 

• The suggestive supp< :hat it had 

been as uncommon to be born with the power of sight as it is now 
to be born incapable of it, in which c who had 

rare gift would appear as prophets or inspire : s to the 

many. Inquiry into tht Human Mind, chap. \ 



504 CAN THE BLIND LEAD THE BLIND? 

the right, the power, to say, " I will bring the blind by a 
way that they know not ; I will lead them in paths that 
they have not known : I will make darkness light before 
them, and crooked things straight." Other guides will 
often assume the same style, and promise the like out- 
come. But, being blind, they say they see, and their 
sin remaineth ; and those they lead end where them- 
selves end — in the ditch. 

The leader of the wain, in Spenser's allegory, bids 
fair (if foul can be fair) for the ditch : 

" May seeme the wayne was very evil ledd, 
When such an one had guiding of the way, 
That knew not whether right he went or else astray." 

Shakspeare's Cressid, so apt to do foolish things, was 
not incapable of uttering wise ones, as where she 
laments, — 

"Ah ! poor our sex ! this fault in us I find, 
The error of our eye directs our mind : 
What error leads, must err." 

Ignis Fatuus is the speaker, in Goethe's Walpurgis- 
nacht, on the Hartz Mountains, when Faust and his evil 
genius are reminded, — 

" And if as guide you choose a meteor's light, 
You must not wonder should we go astray." 

The moral of La Fontaine's fable of the Serpent's 
Head and Tail points in the same direction. The tail 
goes first, and ill comes of it. In broad daylight the 
tail, a self-assuming guide, sees not a whit better than 
were it pitch dark. Of course the now misplaced head 
suffers. One misleading, the other is misled. Now the 
sightless mass jostles against a rock, now against a 
tree, now against a passenger ; and the end is destruc- 
tion. Wretched, exclaims La Fontaine, are the people 
that are in such a case ; most unblessed the State that 



WHERE XO VISION, THE PEOPLE PERISH. 505 

is thus misled ! Malheur eux les Etats tombe's dans son 
ttr ! 

The fool Trinculo, in the Tempest, is no fool when, 
a disgusted witness of the semi-brute Caliban's tipsy 
worship of the drunken butler Stephano, he exclaims, 
11 The folly of this island ! They say, there's but five 
upon this isle : we are three of them : if the other two 
be brained like us, the State totters." 

For, where there is no vision, the people perish. 
Heathenism recognized thus much, after a sort. Plutarch 
relates of declining and falling Athens in the days of 
Phocion, that the disturbances at the sacred rites " gave 
man>' of the people occasion to reflect on the difference 
of the divine dispensation in the present and in ancient 
times. Formerly, said they, mystic visions were seen, 
and voices heard, to the great happiness of the State. 
. . . But now, during the same ceremonies, the gods 
look without concern upon the severest misfortunes that 
can happen to Greece." No vision now ; and a people 
perishing. A wonder and horrible thing, as the inspired 

. ofHilkiah reckoned it, was committed in the land, 

when the prophets prophesied falsely, and the priests 

• rule by their means, and God's people Loved to 

have it SO ; and what would they do in the tjnd thereof? 

When the Son of Man was moved with compassion on 

the multitudes, it was because the)' were scattered 
abro heep having no shepherd. In a sad sen.se is 

it true of many a flock, that when one entereth the fold 
who is not the good shepherd, the\' hear his voice, and 

follow him ; while perhaps the good shepherd, as a 

stranger, will they not follow, but will ike from him ; 

though only by him can they go in .ind out, ami find 

'are; and though he alone is tin: good shepherd 

that giveth his life for the sheep. He that once upon 
Mars Hill at Athens preached to novelty-loving Athens 



506 WHERE NO VISION, THE PEOPLE PERISH. 

their own Unknown God, would have told them of their 
visions at the best, that in the words of a Hebrew 
prophet, the idols but spoke vanity, and the diviners 
saw a lie and told false dreams. That this people, like 
God's own people, had been destroyed for lack of know- 
ledge — going their way as a flock, and troubled because 
there was no shepherd. That there was such a thing as 
wandering from sea to sea, and from the north even to 
the east, — running to and fro to seek the word of the 
Lord, and failing to find it ; ever learning and never 
able to come to a knowledge of the truth. " There- 
fore my people are gone into captivity, because they 
have no knowledge." The vision of all was become 
to them as the words of a book that is sealed, which 
the learned cannot read because it is sealed, and the 
unlearned cannot read because he is unlearned. The 
wisdom of the wise has perished, and the understanding 
of the prudent is hid. " For I beheld, and there was no 
man, even among them, and there was no counsellor, 
that, when I asked, could answer a word." There is no 
counsel in the grave. And it may be said that where 
there is no counsel there is the grave. Where no vision, 
the people perish. To those who will not be learned nor 
understand, but walk on still in darkness, all the foun- 
dations of the earth are out of course. Chaos is come 
again. There may be a way that seemeth right to a 
man — a blind man — but the end thereof is death. It is 
a way of darkness that deepens darker and darker unto 
the perfect night. 

Nor is help availing from this, that, or the other dim- 
sighted neighbour, nor from any number put together 
of such. It is with them as with the baffled seeker in 
Crabbe's tale : 

" Alas ! when men who feel their eyes decay, 
Take more than common pains to find their way, 



BUND LEADERS OF THE BUND, 507 

Yet, when for this they seek each other's aid, 
Their mutual purpose is the more delay'd. 

Many a paraphrase of the proverb of blind-led blind, 
and of a perishing people where there is no vision, might 
be cited, in one form of words or another, often quaint, 
always telling and expressive, from the histories and 
miscellanies of Mr. Carlyle. It is a trite theme with 
him, the need of what he calls Men with an Eye, to lead 
those who need guidance. We might apply what Shak- 
spcare's Gloster, in King Lear, says, after his eyes have 
been barbarously put out, and he seeks a guide in Mad 
Tom, and is warned, " Alack, Sir, he's mad : " 

" Tis the time's plague, when madmen lead the blind." 

Ill fare the peoples that take up with blind guides. 
Like Elymas, when there fell upon him a mist and a 
darkness, they go about seeking some one to lead them 
by the hand. Some one, any one. Who will show us 
any good — who will deliver us from this hour and power 
of darkness ? And sometimes he that is struck blind 
takes f.r guide him that is born blind. And straight- 
wax- they make for the ditch. 

St. Gregory the Great, in his treatise on the Pastoral 
care, Vigorously censures those who, without proper 
qualifications, undertake the care of souls, which he calls 
the art of all arts. Who does not know, he says, that 

the wounds of the mind are more difficult to be under- 
stood than those of the body? and yet nun unacquainted 

with the spiritual precepts will profess themselves phy- 
sicians of tin- heart, while those who air ignorant of the 

i of drugs would blush to set up for physicians of 

tody. And anon he quotes the proverb of the blind- 
led blind. In no such connexion, and iii i: pint, 
Shelley quotes it, when describin and princes 

pale with tenor, whose faith " fell, like a shaft loosed by 
the bowman's error, on their own heart ; 



5o8 BLIND LEADERS OF THE BLIND. 

" they sought and they could find 

No refuge — 'twas the blind who led the blind." 

But, after all, there may be something worse than even 
a blind guide ; for, as South observes in his sermon on 
the fatal imposture of words, wherein he treats of that 
" great plague of the world, deception," which takes 
wrong measures, and makes false musters almost in 
everything, — " A blind guide is certainly a great mis- 
chief ; but a guide that blinds those whom he should 
lead, is certainly a greater." The proverb was full in 
South's eye when, in another sermon, discussing the 
case of a man who exerts all the powers and faculties 
of his soul, and plies all means and opportunities in 
the search of truth which God has vouchsafed him, the 
preacher concludes that such a man may rest upon the 
judgment of his conscience so informed, as a warrantable 
guide of those actions which he must account to God 
for : " And if by following such a guide he fall into the 
ditch, the ditch shall never drown him." But the same 
vigorous divine elsewhere deprecates a blind watchman 
as " equally a nuisance and an impertinence " — and such 
a paradox, both in reason and practice, he contends, is 
a deluded conscience, namely a counsellor who cannot 
advise, and a guide not able to direct. The will and 
the affections are made to follow and obey, not to lead 
or to direct ; and therefore, he goes on to say, if error 
has perverted the order, and disturbed the original 
economy of our faculties, and a blind will thereupon 
comes to be led by a blind understanding, " there is no 
remedy, but it must trip and stumble, and sometimes 
fall into the noisome ditch of the foulest enormities and 
immoralities." 



XLVI. 

A DIVIDED SERVICE. 
St. Matthew vi. 24. 

AS no man can serve two masters, no man can serve 
God and Mammon. Either in the word fxa/x- 
Iudvcis, of Syriac origin, there is here a personifica- 
tion of Riches {Lucrum Puuicc MAMMON (Oritur, says 
Augustine ; and Jerome speaks of Riches being called 
Gcntili Syrorum lingua MAMMONA) ; or, as some sup- 
pose, there was an idol of this name among the Syrians, 
identical with the Plutus of the Greeks. Mammon has, 
at any rate, his worshippers, and claims to be served. 
A false spirit, granted ; but one that claims to be 
worshipped in spirit and in truth, as if he were true. In 
one respect he resembles the only True God, that he 
requires an undivided allegiance. There be gods many 
and lords many, but to his worshipper he must be 
supreme: Me only shalt thou serve. He is a jealous 
god. lie, too, demands of his votary, My son, give 
me thine heart. To thee I am lord and god ; and 
me thou shalt love with all thy heart, and with all 
thy mind, and with all thy soul, and with all thy 
strength. Mammon-worship is an exclusive service ; 
and Mammon-worshippers at large have it brought 
to them that they cannot serve God and Mam- 
mon. Ch y thii day whom ye will serve No 

man two masters ; for either he will hate the 

ind love the other ; or else he will hold to the one, 

anil despise the other. Huucrine, an hunc x sequeri 

Mammon, cries the generous heart out of all ages and 
count: u<\ \>y Mr. C'arlyle, is the !■ 

of known god-, even of known d< . "In him what 



510 MAMMON-WORSHIP. 

glory is there, that ye should worship him ? No glory 
discernible ; not even terror ; at best detestability, ill- 
matched with despicability." In earlier times, says 
Hazlitt, before the diffusion of luxury, of knowledge, 
and other sources of enjoyment had become common, 
and acted as a diversion to the cravings of avarice, " the 
passionate admiration, the idolatry, the hunger and 
thirst of wealth and all its precious symbols, was a kind 
of madness or hallucination, and Mammon was truly 
worshipped as a god." He refers to the intense feeling 
exhibited in Luke's address to his riches, in the City 
Madam; and to the ecstatic raptures of the Spanish 
Rogue in contemplating and hugging his ingots of pure 
gold and Spanish pieces of eight — rhapsodies which to 
our present " more refined and tamer apprehensions 
sound like blasphemy." Shelley finds no improvement 
in the moderns, no abatement of Mammon-worship in 
this age of men that make haste to be rich : 
" Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, 

The signet of its all-enslaving power, 

Upon a shining r ore, and called it gold ; 

Before whose image bow the vulgar great, . . . 

And in the temple of their hireling hearts 

Gold is a living god, and rules in scorn 

All earthly things but virtue." 

Inter nos, he would have said, as Juvenal said of Rome 
and the Romans in his day, sanctissima divitiarum 
Majestas : since gold 's the god we Romans now adore ; 
for though, pernicious gold, no altars flame, nor rise 
such domes in honour of thy name as Peace, Faith, 
Valour, Victory, obtain, (to this effect is Juvenal Eng- 
lished by an old Hand of the sort called Eminent,) "yet 
thou, more honoured, sharest the purer part, the un- 
feigned devotion of the votary's heart." Timon of 
Athens is no such " idle votarist " in his cave : this 
yellow slave will knit and break religions, says he ; and 



THE ALMIGHTY DOLLAR. 511 

"What a god's gold!" he elsewhere exclaims: "to 
thee be worship!" but not of his paying. Our latter- 
day pamphleteer bids inventive men consider, whether 
the secret of this universe, and of man's life there, does, 
after all, as we rashly fancy it, consist in making 
money. ''There is One God, just, supreme, almighty : 
but is Mammon the name of Him ? — With a Hell 
which means ' Failing to make money/ I do not think 
there is a Heaven possible that would suit one well ; 
. . . in brief, all this Mammon-Gospel begins to be 
one of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached ; or al- 
together the shabbiest." Sauerteig can only hope and 
believe that when Mammon-worshippers here and there 
begin to be God-worshippers, a Soul will be felt once 
more in the "huge-pulsing, elephantine, mechanic Ani- 
malism of this Earth," which will then be a blessed Earth 
again. "The Dollar cannot rule in Heaven for ever. 
No; I reckon, not." In the History of Frederick the 
Great, again, we come upon the characteristic reflec- 
tion, ' ts and ducats are divine ; but they are nut 
the most divine. I often wish the Devil had the lion's 
share of them, — at once, and not circuitously as now." 
.^and stigmatizes as one of the evils of our day, 
the rushing of men of vivid imagination into " that 
terrible resolve, to be rich or to die," — of the 
times in "a society so uncertain and troubled as 
while Europe trembles with fear and hope, between 
dreams of a fabulou> prosperity and of a uni. 
social cataclysm. " Coleridge said Ion that could 
we emancipate ourselves from the bedimming influences 
of custom, and the transforming witchcraft of early 
association, we should numerous tribes of fetich- 
worshippers in the street idon and Paris, as we 
hear of on the coasts of Arabia. He i^ referring I 
in which the pi tie calls 



5 1 2 MAMMON- WORSHIP. 

ness idolatry. Dr. Jacob, whether cynically or ironi- 
cally, pronounces money to be the end and aim of life : 
we eat, drink, rise, lie down, to gain money. For that 
we take up professions, make friends, adopt opinions, 
hazard our soul's peace, throw away health and youth 
and all that is best and beautiful under heaven. 
" Money makes us slaves, sinners, rulers among men, 
saints in the eyes of the world. Well, the god must be 
worshipped, since it has been set up." John Newton 
once said, that if Nebuchadnezzar's image was of solid 
gold, and every worshipper was to have a bit of it, he 
feared our nation, as well as the great king's, would be 
ready to fall down before it. 

The men of Abibah are known to have prayed very 
frequently, and very sincerely, to Koomrah-Kamah, the 
god of riches, — men who paid very little attention to 
that rival divinity Kalataree (the promoter of illnesses 
and all disasters) : for what are accidents and diseases 
when put in comparison with the loss or gain of wealth ; 
and who, asks Realmah's historian, would not be rich 
and diseased rather than poor, healthy, and despised ? 
At least thus thought the Sheviri ; but then they were, 
as some think, poor ignorant barbarians, living at an age 
of the world when the principles of wisdom had not 
been fully worked out by mankind. 

The futility of a divided service between God and 
any idol, be the latter named Mammon or what you 
will, is expressively indicated in Michelet's account of 
the efforts made in France for the recovery of Charles 
the Sixth. Vain, he says, were prayers to God for 
peace and the king's health : prayers stifled by re- 
proaches and curses could not rise to the throne of 
grace. " But, whilst addressing God, the devil was also 
tried. Offerings were made to the one, conjurations 



A DIVIDED SER I ICE. 5 1 3 

addressed to the other. Heaven and hell were im- 
plored at one and the same time," and for one and the 
same purpose. 

Best intentions, may be pleaded in apology. But 
sometimes there is the paradox of the worst intentions. 
It is written : The sacrifice of the wicked is abomina- 
tion ; how much more when he bringeth it with a 
wicked mind ? 

" May one be pardoned, and retain the offence ?" 

muses guilty Claudius, who would fain, in his own bad 
sense, make the best of both worlds, — a bad best. He 
had yet to learn the Psalmist's lesson, " If I incline unto 
wickedness with mine heart, the Lord will not hear me." 
He that brings his gift to the altar, and then and there 
remembers that his brother hath aught against him, 
must leave there his gift before the altar, and go his 
way ; first be reconciled to his brother, and then come 
and offer his gift. Cowper's hymn verse is to the 
purpose, — 

" Had I a throne above the rest, 

Where angels and archangels dwell, 
One sin, unslain, within my breast, 

Would make that heaven as dark as hell.'' 

The son of Sirach asks of him that washeth himself 

after the touching <>f a dead body, and then touches il 

, what availeth his washing? "So is it with a 

man that fasteth for his sins, anil goeth again, and 

doeth the same: who will hear hi- prayer? Or what 

doth his humbling profit him ?" lie is yd in thi 

of bitterness and the bond of iniquity whose heart is 
• in the sight of God ; he has m Lther part 

nor lot in the matter; for where his treasure is, there 

will his heart be also, and his tr< with another 

than the Mosl High: he cannot serve both, yet with 
both he would be on good tei no hold- 

1 1. 



5H 'MAY ONE BE PARDONED, 

ing," protests Shakspeare's fair Florentine, " to swear 
by him whom I protest to love, that I will work against 
him :" the confusion were too palpable. The sancti- 
monious pirate that went to sea with the ten com- 
mandments, but scraped one out of the tables — the 
eighth — had no such scruple. "Why, 'twas a com- 
mandment to command the captain and all the rest 
from their functions ; they put forth to steal," as Shak- 
speare's Lucio and his associates agree. If we say that 
we have fellowship with Him who is light, and in whom 
is no darkness at all, and ourselves meanwhile walk in 
darkness, we lie, and do not the truth. When Pope 
Hadrian II. consented at last to admit Lothair to the 
holy communion, he warned him, " But if thou think- 
est in thine heart to return to wallow in lust, beware of 
receiving this sacrament, lest thou provoke the terrible 
judgment of God." And the king shuddered, but 
did not draw back. It was avowedly in the prospect of 
death that the lines of Burns were written, — 

" Fain would I say, ' Forgive my foul offence !' 

Fain promise never more to disobey ; 
But should my Maker health again dispense, 

Again I might desert fair Virtue's way : 

Again in Folly's path might go astray ; 
Again exalt the brute, and sink the man ; 

Then how should I for heavenly mercy pray, 
Who act so counter heavenly mercy's plan ? 
Who sin so oft have mourn'd, yet to temptation ran ? " 

John Ward, the diary-keeping vicar of Stratford-upon- 
Avon, takes note of one mischievous assertion of the 
Papistce, as ruinous to any healthy conscience : asserunt 
enim posse esse remissiojiem culpce, et retentionem culpa ; 
that one may be pardoned, and retain the offence. The 
good vicar's maxim is applicable per contra — that Non 
tollatur peccatum, nisi restituatur oblatum. " Hee that 
entertaines any sinne delightfully," the diarist writes in 



AXD RETAIX THE OFFENCE 



another place, "itt leavens alle the whole lump, all his 
thoughts, desires, affections." We read of the culprit 
heroine of OrUy Farm, that she, Lady Mason, had 
striven to be true and honest — with the exception of 
that one wrong-doing whereby hangs the tale ; but that 
one misdeed had communicated its poison to her whole 
life : truth and honest}', — fair, unblemished truth and 
open-handed, fearless honesty, — had been impossible to 
her. Before she could be true and honest it would be 
/ that she go back and cleanse herself from 
the poison of that deed. " Will not sin last for ever, — 
sin such as mine?" "Not if you repent/' she is re- 
minded; — "repent and make such restitution as is 
possible. Lady Mason, say that you have repented. 
Tell me that you have asked Him to pardon you!'' 
In after days her best friends discuss her career : " How- 
beautiful she was in her sorrow, when we thought that 
her life had been pure and good \" "And it had been 
good, — for many years past." "No; for the stolen 
property was still there." Corinthian converts had it 
on the best authority, that they could not drink the cup 
of the Lord and the cup of devils, could not be par- 
takers of the Lord's table and of the table o[ devils. 
John Wesley related from the pulpit how, as a very 
; man, he had a mind to be upon the stage, but 
with qualms of conscience V> deter him ; how he 
pie, pray, could he be a player, and 

t, and be a Christian. lid the)", 

layer went to th lent ; th 

the law of the lar. 

receive th intent unless he proof th it he 

repented. This • trine. 

I, then, if th.it be the ca . I W 
and old W 

I • ' ' my part for the d vil, 



5i6 'MAY OXE BE PARDONED 

anybody;" and to serve two masters, in spite of the 
ada^e. 

o 

Xo sooner had Apascides been received by the rites 
of baptism into the bosom of the Church, than the 
Xazarene, his instructor, hastened to make him con- 
scious of the impossibility of his retaining the office 
and robes of pagan priesthood. "He could not, it was 
evident, profess to worship God, and continue even 
outwardly to honour the idolatrous altars of the fiend." 
The heathen king in Philaster can recognize as well as 
the best good Christian the incompatibility of prayer 
with deliberate unrighteousness : 

" But how can I 

Look to be heard of gods that must be just, 
Praying upon the ground I hold by wrong V 

Harley L'Estrange, in the novel, when questioned by 
Parson Dale whether he has ever felt the efficacy of 
prayer, owns to having never found it efficacious ; and 
yet, " so far back as I can remember, it has at least 
been my habit to pray to Heaven, night and morning, 
until, at least — until — " " Until you cherished revenge ? 
You have not dared to pray since ? Oh, reflect what 
evil there is within us, when we dare not come before 
Heaven — dare not pray for what we wish!" The rap- 
ture of the conscience at sudden release from a guilty 
thought, may well be pronounced a far nobler bliss 
than what a Greek poet deemed the highest, the sudden 
relief of pain ; and not many chapters later in the story 
we read how, beside the bed where he knelt in boyhood, 
Harley paused to kneel once more ; for, "the luxury of 
prayer, interrupted since he had nourished schemes of 
which his passions had blinded him to the sin, but 
which, nevertheless, he dared not confess to the All- 
Merciful, was restored to him." Hector, returning from 
the fight, and entreated by his mother to sacrifice to 



AND RETAIN THE OFFENCE V 

the gods, avows himself afraid to do so with unwashed 
hands : so ill beseems it a warrior, besmeared with 
blood and dirt, to present his supplication to Heaver.. 
" If the leprosy of sin cleaves to thy head," writes an 
old divine, " God has forbid thee to enter the congre- 
gation. If lust lies burning in thy heart, if pride lies 
swelling in thy bosom, beware and stand off." The 
state of Balaam's mind, as Bishop Butler interprets and 
exposes it, was this : he wanted to do what he knew 
to be very wicked, and he cast about for ways to recon- 
cile this wickedness with his duty ; nor is the number 
inconsiderable of those who thus put half-deceits upon 
themselves, by means of religious equivocations, subter- 

, and palliating matters to themselves, that so 
u conscience may be laid asleep, and they may go on in a 
course of wickedness with less disturbance." Dr. South 
says of him who, by hypothesis, comes to church with 
an ill intention, that he comes to God's house upon the 
devil's errand, and the whole act is thereby rendered 
evil and detestable before God. The prayers of a 
wicked man are by Jeremy Taylor likened to "the 
breath of corrupted lungs : God turns away from such 
unwholesome breathings." It is of his Cleveland) the 
pirate, that Scott remarks, that how far soever the 
guilty may satisfy his own mind, and stupify the 
feelings of r< ich a conditional repentance, 

we may well question whether it is not, in the 
of Heaven, rather a presumptuous aggravation, than 

xpiation of his sins. Applicable too is what Sir 
Walt. in the i 'his Sir Kenneth, how, 

while our prayers have in every word admitted 

the vanity and nothifl the things of time i.i 

:i with those of eternity, should we hope t I 
deceive the Searcher of I by giving the rein to 

worldly | i immediately u] a our 



518 CASTING PEARLS BEFORE SWINE. 

knees ? One of the folk-songs of Southern India, trans- 
lated by Mr. Gover, is a word in season : 

" To pray and serve yet not be pure, 
In dirty pot to place good food, 
To worship God while sins endure, 
Can never turn to good." 

The conclusion of one of Crabbers posthumous tales 
may serve for ours — where he pictures a man who 

" mourns his weakness, hopes he shall prevail 

Against his frailty, and yet still is frail. 

" Such is his life ! and such the life must be 
Of all who will be bound, yet would be free ; 
Who would unite Avhat God to part decrees — 
The offended conscience and the mind at ease ; 
Who think, but vainly think, to sin and pray, 
And God and Mammon in their turn obey." 



XLVII. 

CASTING PEARLS BEFORE SWINE. 
St. Matthew vii. 6. 

EICHORN and Kuinoel surmise that the word in 
the Hebrew Gospel represented in the Greek by 
to ayiov, and Englished " that which is holy," as a thing 
therefore not to be given away to the dogs, was in 
reality the same as that which occurs in Exodus xxxii. 
2, and signifies an ear-ring. This would make the 
parallel fitter and closer with the casting of pearls 
before swine. Other expositors prefer the notion of 
something which more particularly may be thrown to 
dogs — say a portion of the flesh of a sanctified victim, 
and, as such, consecrated, holy. This would be more in 
the dog's way, certainly, than jewellery of any descrip- 
tion ; but it leaves the pearls for the swine, all the 



CASTIXG PEARLS BEFORE SWINE. 519 

same ; and pigs arc not known to appreciate pearls any 
more than dogs to delight in ear-rings. To the latter 
jewels the Orientals are said to have attributed a degree 
of superstitious sanctity, which may have given rise to 
the substitution of to ciyiov in the Greek. At any rate. 
however, symbolical expressions of a like character 'are 
frequent in the New Testament ; and Clemens Alexan- 
drinus supposes them to have been originally so em- 
ployed by Eastern sages, and thence adopted not only 
by the Hebrews, but transported into Greece by Pytha- 
goras, who had studied in Egypt, — Homer employing 
several terms of reproach of the same description. 

Pertinently expressive is the proverb of Solomon, that 
as a jewel of gold in a swine's snout, so is a fair woman 
which is without discretion. 

Trospcro felt that the jewel of kindness was thrown 
away on brutish Caliban, whom he had pitied, taken 
pains to make him speak, taught him each hour one 
thing or other; "savage," he finds him and he calls 
him when all is done, "a thing most brutish," — 

'• Abhorred slave ; 
Which any print of goodness will nut take, 
Being capable <>( all ill.'' 

When didactic Chesterfield in his very gravest mood 
impressed upon his son, implicitly rather than explicitly, 

the tint;. ty and affection to himself, of regard and 

friendship for his clerical tutor, and in short "all the 
relative duties of man," etc., he complimented the yo 

tleman by contrast with the fribbles and fast youth 

of the day: "Such solid arguments would be thrown 

ty upon such shallow puppies. Leave them to their 

:id to their dirt) f which 

my lord prophesies they will severely feel the effects 

when too late. 

le Clap, in The Pathfinder y holds ingratitude to 



520 CASTING PEARLS BEFORE SWINE. 

be the vice of a hog. " Some people say that it is the 
vice of a king ; but I say it is the failing of a hog, for 
treat the animal to your own dinner, and he would eat 
you for the dessert.'" 

In the imaginary conversation between Dr. Johnson 
and Home Tooke, a remark by the former in disparage- 
ment of the critics of his philological companion brings 
about the reply, " Among these hogs of Westphaly 
there is not one with a snout that can penetrate into 
my inclosure, prompt as they are to batten on it and 
bespatter it, and to trample it down as they grunt and 
trot along. " Johnson's head and body keep admirable 
time to the other's words — for he likes the period, as if 
it might be his own. It was in reference to the argu- 
ments prepared by Johnson at Boswell's instance for a 
complex case before the Scottish lords of session, that 
one of these latter deprecated the pains taken as labour 
lost — "for, indeed, it is casting pearls before swine/'' 
Wilberforce said of Burke, that, like the fabled object 
of the fairy's favours, " whenever he opened his mouth 
pearls and diamonds dropped from him ;" but the ne- 
glect of the House was unpleasantly suggestive of an 
unsavoury comparison. As Goldsmith put it, 

" In short, 'twas his fate, unemploy'd or in place, sir, 
To eat mutton cold, and cut blocks with a razor." 

Which last trenchant figure of speech reminds us of 
Balzac's saying, as to revealing certain truths to certain 
minds, or what the owners are pleased to call their 
minds, — c'est laisser des rasoirs sous la main (Tun singe. 

Hartley Coleridge affirms nothing to be rasher, no- 
thing more futile and profitless, than the attempt to 
teach those, whatever their age may be, over whom 
you have no natural or constituted authority, who do 
not themselves acknowledge their need of instruction. 
If the matter, indeed, be one that admits of a point- 



CAS TIXG PEA RLS BEFORE S 1 1 r INE. 5 - 1 

blank appeal to the conscience — if it concern the eter- 
nal interests of the soul, Duty may demand the experi- 
ment, " and Grace may cause it to succeed, in spite of 
all moral incapacities and repugnance. Yet even in 
these cases, the blessed Saviour Himself has cautioned 
us not to throw pearls before swine/'' To apply the 
lines of Corneille's Polyeucte : — 

" Mais que sort de parlor dc ces tresors caches 
A des esprits que Dieu n'a pas encor touch 

Some are not capable of receiving rational answers, 
especially in divine things, Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
asserts in the Aids to Reflection: "they were not only 
lost upon them, but religion dishonoured by the con- 
test." It is written in the Book of Proverbs, that whoso 
reproveth a scorn er getteth to himself shame, and he 
that rebuketh a wicked man getteth himself a blot. 
"Speak not in the ears of a fool; for he will despise 
the wisdom of thy words." So again with immature 
faculti' . I', tbes of a span long can as well digest the 
igest of strong meat, as pigs can pearls. 

One of the two sonnets indited by Milton on the 
detraction which followed upon his writing certain trca- 
. — 

•• I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs 
By the known rules of ancient liberty, 

Wi ht a barbarous noise environs 1 

( )f owl-, and CUCltO ... 

But this is got by 1 aria to ho 

That anonymous "proletarian diplomatist" who, having 

end the Peace < I ideivd it 

a suitable opportunity to read a paper recommending 

hole civilized world t«» go to war with Russia, ami 
to whom • (1 to 

listen, published his pamphlel under the vindic- 

tive title 



RESERVE IX IMPARTING 



Congress, with what was decreed an obvious innuendo 
at the expense of the inappreciative audience — if audi- 
ence that may be called which audience refused. One 
can fancy the foiled orator's eyes in a fine frenzy rolling, 
like those of the Black Dwarf when repudiating the 
" slavish and bestial doctrine " propounded by Earns- 
cliff, and putting an end to the conference in this style : 
" I spurn at it, as worthy only of the beasts that perish ; 
but I will waste no more words with you." This species 
of impatient contempt it is that has found consistent 
supporters of the rule of reserve in doctrinal mysteries. 
Many, approving of a hard-and-fast line of demarcation 
between exoteric and esoteric,, like to have strong meat 
kept apart for themselves, and for a few of the hardy 
stomachs they deem fit for such food, but they would 
have the babes " stick to their milk." Even Pytha- 
goras, as Mr. Lewes says, earnest thinker as he was, 
could not be made to believe in the fitness of the mul- 
titude for truth ; he had two sorts of doctrine to teach 
— one, believed by him to be the truth, for a few dis- 
ciples, whom he chose with extreme caution ; the other, 
for those who pleased to listen, was what he thought the 
masses were fitted to receive. Marcus Tullius, in the 
imaginary dialogue with Quinctus Cicero, obviates an 
objection by the latter to his talking as if there were a 
plurality of gods, by professing to speak as those around 
him, and employing in these matters the language of his 
country. " Italy is not so fertile in hemlock as Greece ; 
yet a wise man will dissemble half his wisdom on such a 
topic ; and I, adopting the means of dialogue, have often 
delivered my opinions in the voice of others, and speak 
now as custom, not as reason leads me." Shaftesbury 
contends that we can never do more injury to truth, 
than by discovering too much of it, on some occasions, 
— it being the same with understandings as with eyes : 



SACRED MYSTERIES. 



to such a certain size and make just so much light is 
necessary, and no more : whatever is beyond, brings 
darkness and confusion. " Tis real humanity and kind- 
ness to hide strong truths from tender eyes." " It may 
be nee-. 3 well now as heretofore, for wise men to 

speak in parables, and with a double meaning, that they 
only who have ears to hear, may hear." Sister Opis 
cries to Sister Arge in the mystico-metrical adaptation 
from Herodotus by a modern minstrel : — 

" Show not ! show not ! let men know not 

I is coming. For the mind of the world is undefined ; 
And the dark not yet the day-star doth rek 

Wherefore watch ye well, and ward, sister, hold ye fast, and guard 
The sacred straw from bruise or flaw, 
And the mystic veil from soil or crease."' 

The nakedness of truth, urges a Roman ecclesiastic, 
should never be too openly exposed to the eyes of the 
;ar ; and wisely, to his thinking, was it feigned by 
the ancient-, that Truth lay concealed in a well. 

lican divines account it an honoured custom with 
all the sober and wise nations of the world, to reserve 
the great rites of their religion in occulta. The Egyp- 
tians, lor instance, "those great masters of all learni. 

:.■ studiously the)' locked up their sacred things from 
all access and knowledge of the Vulgar; and by the 
tem <-f hereditary priestho. >d, confined the knowk 

erdotal mysteries fa te. The Phoeni- 

cians, too, the Babylonians, and the Grecians, had they 

not their Upa yp(ififj.ara, and their 

their sacred and peculiar \ whereby t<» 

ue "the reverend mysteries of their religion from the 

rude inspection of the rout'*? The Romans had their 
f forbiddal, Procul este profani; and in the 

Jewish Church "the people were not suffered to enter 
into the holy of r look into the ark, 



524 CASUISTRY OF RESERVE. 

no, nor so much as to touch it ; and all this by the par- 
ticular, express prohibition of God Himself." Mon- 
taigne emphatically approves the Church's interdiction 
of "the promiscuous, indiscreet, and irreverent use of 
the holy and divine Psalms ; " for we ought not, he 
urges, to mix God in our actions but with the highest 
reverence and caution ; and he accounts it the reverse 
of decent " to see the Holy Bible, the rule of our wor- 
ship and belief, tumbled up and down a hall or a 
kitchen. They were formerly mysteries, but are now 
become sports and recreations. . . . The reading of 
the Scriptures ought to be a temperate and premedi- 
tated act, and to which men should always add this 
devout preface, sursum corda, preparing even the body 
to so humble and composed a gesture and countenance 
as shall evidence their veneration and attention." Nei- 
ther is it, he insists, a book fit for every one to handle, 
but the study of select men set apart for that purpose : 
" the wicked and ignorant blemish it. 'Tis not a story 
to tell, but a history to reverence, fear, and adore." 
Fontenelle, a feebler and colder-blooded Montaigne, 
said he might have his hand full of truth, and open 
only his little finger. He was scarcely the sort of man 
to appreciate the argument, so useful for theologians to 
keep in mind, that religious truth is valuable in propor- 
tion as it finds a place in the hearts of ordinary men. 

And ordinary men are not swine — unless indeed to 
those who take up the odi and arceo verbs of scorn for 
Xhe profanum pecus. Yet do pig-headed people abound. 
Upon how many is argument, for instance, purely 
wasted, and remonstrant reasoning clean thrown away. 
Your best pearls in such cases go but the way of the 
trough. Either the brains, or the will, or both, are too 
porcine for that kind of pabulum. There are people 
who are evidence-proof: statistics fly off from them 



PIG-HEADED PEOPLE. 



u like shot off a duck's back ; " and the more argument 
seems to triumph against them, the more profoundly 
convinced they become of the truth of their own posi- 
tion. Hobbes said that when men have once acquiesced 
in untrue opinions, and registered them as authenticated 
records in their minds, it is no less impossible to speak 
intelligibly to such men than to write legibly on a paper 
already scribbled over. Verba fiunt mortuo, you are talk- 
ing to one who will not heed you. Moliere's Arnolphe 
is typical when he protests, 

" I'rechez, patrocinez, jusqu'a la Pcntccutc; 
Vous scrcz dbahi, quand vous scrcz au bout, 
e vous nc m'en aurez rien persuade" du tout." 

So, in his way, another way, is Alcestc : — 

" Je sais que vous parlez, monsieur, le micux du monde ; 
Kn beaux raisonnements vous abondez toujours; 
Mais vous perdcz le temps, et tous vos beaux discours." 

And so, yet again, in quite another, is Orgon : — 

Ion frere, vos conseils sont les meilleurs du monde ; 
lis sont bien raisonnes. et j'en fais un grand cas : 
Mais vous trouverez bon que je n'en use p; . 

Lot' ribes, with a touch of humour, from obser- 

vation, and from experience of the trouble they 
him, a set of men whose discours seldom In the 

right, they are as seldom to be convinced they are in 

the wrong ; "it being all one ' out to draw those 

men out of their mistakes, who have no settled notions, 

rant of his habitation who has no 

settled abode." You may as well 

bid the sea for to obey the i; 
As . . . shake the fabric of his fully." 

R hl< : h ( tsbaldistone tells his cousin Frank, " There 

ither wisdom nor profit in disputing- with such a 
mind as Sir I Iildebrand's, which hardens itself a 
conviction, and believes in its own inspirations as firmly 



526 INCAPABLE OF REASONING. 

as we good Catholics do in those of the Holy Father of 
Rome." " It seems to me, Anselmo," says Lothario, in 
Cervantes' novelet, " that it is with you as it always is 
with the Moors, who never can be convinced of the error 
of their sect by the evidence of Holy Scripture, nor by 
arguments drawn from reason. ... So hopeless is 
the task of contending by argument against such pre- 
posterous folly." De Quincey declares, that to some 
people the only appropriate style of reasoning is by 
kicking them ; a posteriori arguments are alone intelli- 
gible to their perverse senses. There are persons, said 
Archbishop Whately, whom to attempt to convince by 
even the strongest reasons and most cogent arguments, 
is like King Lear putting a letter before a man without 
eyes, and saying, " Mark but the penning of it ! " to 
which he answers, " Were all the letters suns, I could not 
see one." A scientific writer exposes the error of scien- 
tific men in being ready to think that the monomaniac 
who can square the circle can be set right by a scientific 
demonstration of his error — there being on record one, 
and one only, instance of the conversion of a circle- 
squarer, which was as far back as the beginning of the 
seventeenth century, and the quadrator thus converted 
to sanity a Jesuit. We read of an agricultural labourer 
who squared the circle, and sent the papers to Mr. De 
Morgan,* who returned them with a note to the effect 
that his correspondent had not the knowledge requisite 
to see in what the problem consisted ; and the Professor 
got for answer a letter in which he was told that a per- 
son who could not see that he had done the thing should 
change his business, and turn his attention to a Sunday 
school to learn what he could, and keep " the little 
children from durting their close." 

* A Budget of Paradoxes. By Augustus De Morgan, F.R.A.S. 



IMPERVIOUS TO ARGUMENT. 



Sir Henry Holland includes among his "Recollec- 
tions" the friendship he formed at Milan with one of 
the Directors of the Ambrosian Library, Amoretti, the 
author of a work, Sulla Raddomanzia — the " science," 
as he insisted on calling it, of the Divining Rod ; the 
whole mind of this good old man being engrossed with 
that one subject, to his belief in which he sedulously 
sought to bring over his English friend. The latter 
speaks of Amoretti's experiments as carrying sources of 
fallacy on the very face of them; but adds, that "his 
gentle and earnest simplicity forbade an}' exposure of 
these self-deceptions. There are many cases in life 
when to convince, even of error, is a breach of the charity 
we owe to one another." That is a suave and soothing 
version of the plain truth, that upon some folks argu- 
ment is simply thrown away. 

What the Manchester man said of Archdeacon Deni- 
son is often quoted, "One might as well go about to 
confute a bull." A Papal bull for instance. One of 
Coleridge's essays on his own times begins with the re- 
flection, that of the man)- afflicting truths, to the evidence 
of which even the kindest natures must gradually con- 
in their conviction, this is the last and most reluc- 
tantly admitted, that there are men and classes of men 

whom no truth can convince, whom no evidence cm con- 
vert from their erroi Professor Spaldin 

judices and prep : ins on which arguments can take 

no hold, but which are often displaced by other notions 

ithout argument ; just as, in a siege, the shot 

and shell rebound without effect from the masonry of a 

imated bastion, which a .storming party, if they can 

one- the trenches, will carry at the fi ,uli. 

■doie I look describes the head of one of his country 

squii firm as the wall of a I ut, and 

the harder you hit him with a hint the StrOfl .me 



528 IMPERVIOUS TO ARGUMENT. 

back to you, without having made the slightest impres- 
sion. As with hints, so with arguments. And the pro- 
fessor's remark about minds upon which arguments can 
" take no hold," reminds us of George Eliot's description 
of Mr. Tulliver. Certain seeds which are required to 
find a nidus for themselves under unfavourable circum- 
stances, have been supplied by nature with an apparatus 
of hooks, so that they will get a hold on very unrecep- 
tive surfaces. " The spiritual seed which had been scat- 
tered over Mr. Tulliver had apparently been destitute of 
any corresponding provision, and had slipped off to the 
w r inds again, from a total absence of hooks." But the 
fault lies mostly with the unreceptive surface. Arguing 
against a fool may well be deemed the most hopeless of 
all operations — it being as hard to confute him to his 
own satisfaction as to catch water in a sieve, or make a 
rope of sand. On a beau refuter ses vains raisonnements. 
Now and then, it is true, says a Saturday Reviewer, one 
meets a fool so hollow and so pretentious that it is im- 
possible to resist the temptation of having a throw with 
him ; but even in such a case as this, the execution 
ought to be swift and certain. If you can impose abso- 
lute silence on your fool, the Reviewer thinks it may be 
worth while to spend a little time and trouble in de- 
spatching him ; but " if he be one of those lively fools 
who can skip to and fro with the celerity and heartiness 
of that ignoble but tormenting insect which can leap a 
hundred times the length of its own body, who is no 
sooner expelled from one corner than he has entrenched 
himself in another, then it is much the better plan to 
leave him to disport at his ease." The Socratic power 
of driving an antagonist into a corner is supposed to be 
either lost in these days, or perhaps to have only existed 
formerly on condition of one man's supplying the an- 
swers as well as the questions. " Haud thy tongue, 



TILE ATTEMPTS TO C0XV1XCE. 529 

woman, haud thy tongue," is the laird's finisher in Gait's 
best story : " It's a thrashing o' the water, and a raisin' 
o' bells, to speak to ane o' thy capacity on things so far 
aboon thy understanding." And therefore Grippy bids 
Girzy "gae butt the house, and see gin the supper's 
ready," as something a little more in her way and within 
her means. Compare the style of Benvenuto Cellini 
with the Lombard captain at the gate of Prato, " a ro- 
bust, lusty man, who spoke in a very rough, brutish 
manner, and was exceeding ignorant and presumptuous. 
. . . This stupid mortal now shook his head, now 
turned himself one way and now another ... ut- 
tered oaths and imprecations, and told me he did not 
understand this puzzling affair of mine. Being at last 
tired of the fool, I desired him to leave it to me, who 
did understand it." John Wesley in middle age pro- 

jd to have a thousand times found his father's words 
true : " You may have peace with the Dissenters if ; 
do not dispute with them. But if you do, they will 
1 out-fact ' and ' out-lung ' you ; and, at the end, you will 
be where yuu were at the beginning." Shirley's Dean 
agrees with regard to some "really admirable people" 
who fancy that free inquiry on any "shelved " topic is 
pernicious, that they are never to be argued with, if you 
can help it, but simply to be avoided ; argument " only 
renders their hostility more bitter." The alien 
the understanding he deems inure hopeless than the 

f the heart. A more famous Dean, h 
St. Patrick's, declared in the Drupier's letter- that! 

re three sorts of persons with whom he v. Ived 

fce — a highwayman with a pistol .it his 

breast, a troop of dragoons who came to plunder 
house, and a man of the lav wl make a men: 

accusing him : in each of th< 5, u which are aim 

the same," the best method is to keep out of the way. 



530 WASTED ARGUMENTATION. 

Even so Byron, when Leigh Hunt defended his poetical 
style, as written " upon system," said no more : for, 
" when a man talks of system, his case is hopeless." 
And in much the same spirit a Saturday Reviewer said 
of a distinguished Oxford Professor, "It is an act of 
condescension to argue at all with a man who can only 
write in a scream." Quite a different sort of controver- 
sialist it was that provoked the remark from the same 
quarter, how useless it is to attempt to talk a man into 
a belief in truth, or principle, or honour, who frankly 
avows that he regards them as elegant superfluities. " It 
would be about as hopeful a task to argue a Scotch po- 
litical economist into poetry or love." It is no use dis- 
cussing the flavour of grapes with an Esquimaux, or 
disputing with a native of Timbuctoo on the properties 
of ice. Mrs. Oliphant somewhere gives utterance to the 
exclamation, that surely of all incomprehensible entities, 
the most amazing is a fool — a creature insensate, un- 
reasoning, upon whom neither argument nor fact can 
make any impression. Not much better appears King 
George the Third to have been in the estimate of our 
great Whig historian, when discussing the coronation 
oath : " To argue with him was impossible. Dundas 
tried to explain the matter, but was told to keep his 
Scotch metaphysics to himself." Chesterfield observes, 
in one of his miscellaneous pieces, that a difference in 
opinion, though in the merest trifles (not that the coro- 
nation oath was one), alienates little minds, especially of 
high rank ; and of such he adds, finished courtier and 
man of the world as he was, that it is impossible to in- 
form, but very easy to displease them. His pearls he 
kept for other purposes and other persons. He had no 
• fancy for seeing his pearls trampled upon ; still less for 
being himself, as the sequel, turned upon, and rent, or 
rended. 



XLVIII. 

AN EYE WITH A BEAM, AXD AN EYE FOR A 

MOTE. 
St. Luke vi. 41, 42.* 

THE diction of proverbs is often purposely extrava- 
gant, and affects a sort of converse rcductio ad 
absurdum, substituting for reduction a rule of addition or 
multiplication on a monstrous scale. A beam of wood 
in the eye of a man, is nearly as fantastic a supposition 
as a camel threading his way through that of a needle. 
But the big beam of wood does excellent service by way 
of contrast to the little mote, — or, as it might be ren- 
dered, splinter, — a rendering analogous to the previous 
figure of speech ; a bulky plank, or rafter, or beam, in 
the one clause of the proverb, and a mere splinter of the 
same wood in the second. 

A beam, plank, or rafter in the eye, were that possible, 
— and in proverbs all things are possible, — is not calcu- 
lated to improve the eyesight The bulk of it is an 
objection ; to see at all, the eye must see <>ver it, across it, 
or round some corner of it, how it may ; for the opaque 
density of such a cubic mass <>f matter is decidedly 
a transparent medium. He must be clair- 
int indeed to whom such a medium v iceable. 

Nevertheless, there are people who, by hypothesis, in the 

pr<<. ' it, if n<»t see all the I 

ter for it. All laws of optics notwithstanding, they 

through the ma im in their own eye, and in spite 

of it, if not indeed by means of it, d< I demon- 

* For a pi ..'>us chapter of illustrations of th nding 

passage in St. Matthew, 191 of the First 

turns on >' 



AX EYE WITH A BEAM 



strate, and denounce the tiny splinter that lurks in the 
eye of a brother. The beam acts as a magnifying glass, 
and the splinter is magnified accordingly. They see 
through that glass darkly ; but the darkness is not to 
them a darkness that may be felt. The light that is in 
them is darkness, and how great is that darkness ! Yet 
to themselves they seem to revel in the brightest of day- 
light, while their brother gropes among the shadows of 
night. They are fain to help the poor creature. They 
would like to operate forthwith upon that inflamed eye 
of his, and pluck out the irritating splinter. Nowhere 
perhaps is there a keener eye for a splinter than an eye 
with a plank in it. The eye with a beam within is the 
very eye for a mote without. It can see clearly to cast it 
out at a moment's notice, and dearly it longs to do so ; 
for the beam cannot abide the mote ; the splinter is an 
eyesore to the plank. 

It takes a long time to learn by heart so as to take to 
heart Archbishop Whately's maxim, or peiisee, that ten 
thousand of the greatest faults in our neighbours, are of 
less consequence to us than one of the smallest in our- 
selves. Elsewhere he says, "Never is the mind less 
fitted for self-examination, than when most occupied in 
detecting the faults of others." Have you never, asks 
Ellesmere, found the critic disclose four errors on his own 
part for one that he delights to point out in the sayings 
or doings of the person he criticizes ? Shakspeare's 
Biron claims the right to ask his companions, noble 
and royal alike, Dumain, Longueville, and the king of 
Navarre, addressing them singly and collectively, — 



u But are you not ashamed ? nay, are you not, 
.All three of you, to be thus much o'ershot ? 
You found his mote ; the king your mote did see ; 
But I a beam do find in each of three.'"' 



AXD AN EYE EOR A MOTE. 



Who, exclaims Juvenal, can stand hearing the Gracchi 
complaining of sedition ? Quis tulcrit Gracclws dc sedi- 
tion* querentes f Even Benvolio is thus taken to task 
by Mercutio : " What eye, but such an eye, would spy 
out such a quarrel ? Thy head is as full of quarrels 
as an egg is full of meat ; and yet thy head hath been 
beaten as addle as an egg, for quarrelling." The raven 
chides blackness, quoth Ulysses, in Troilus and Cressida ; 
and " He'll be physician that should be the patient," 
Agamemnon adds. This is all in ridicule of Ajax, who 
protests, " I do hate a proud man, as I hate the engen- 
dering of toads," and yet he loves himself, is the aside 
of Ulysses ; is it not strange ? When Gloster tells King 
Henry, " Thy son I killed for his presumption," the 
retort is obvious : " Hadst thou been killed when first 
thou didst presume, thou hadst not lived to kill a son of 
mine." Clodius accusat vuvchos, the proverb has it : an 
equivalent in terms to, The devil rebukes sin. An 
accuser should always, as Plautus puts it, enter an 
appearance with clean hands : " Qui alterum incusat 
probri cum ipsum se intueri oportet." The glass-house 
tenant should be shy of stone-throwing. When the 
archbishop, in Land r of A?icona, has his fling at 

the consul in the words, " Thus we teach the pruud their 
duty," the consul rejoins, 

" Let the lame man teach the lame 

To walk, the blind man teach the blind to 

Plutarch ob f the letters full of bitterest in- 

tive which passed between Otho and Yitellius, that 
well-grounded thoughtheirmutu.il reproaches might be, 
and indeed were, it was absurd for the one to insult the 
other with what might with equal justice be objected to 
both; for their charges were of prodigality, effemia . 

pacity for war, previ ■. ertyand unbounded in- 

debtedness — points wherein it were hard to say which 



534 CORRUPT ASSAILANTS OF CORRUPTION. 

them had the advantage. The pot called the kettle 
black, and the kettle had a tu quoque right of reply. 
Gibbon says of the chagan of the Avars, Baian, who 
affected to complain of the insincerity of the Greeks, 
that this barbarian prince was at least a match for the 
most civilized nations in the refinement of dissimulation 
and perfidy. Philip the Fair denouncing the cruelties 
and tyranny of the Inquisition, and issuing his ordinance 
against an Office that tortured into false admissions of 
guilt, and suborned false witnesses where confession of 
guilt was not to be extorted by torture, is an edifying 
study, — remembering that Philip was the king who so 
cruelly seized and tortured the Templars. " Of lawless 
force shall lawless Mars complain ? " is the upbraiding 
query of Homer's indignant Jove. 

Bolingbroke inveighed against corrupt assailants of 
political corruption, as men that " must have fronts of 
brass, and deserve all the indignation that is due to 
iniquity, aggravated by impudence." Montague, accused 
in 1698 of peculation and greed, had the right of retort, 
that how his largesses had been bestowed none knew 
better than some of the austere patriots who harangued 
so loudly against his avidity. The profligate Duke of 
Wharton's declamation on public virtue, in 172 1, is well 
said by Earl Stanhope — whose ancestor and namesake 
by title died of that speech, or at least of the excitement 
of his own in answering it — to have come a little 
strangely from the President of the Hell-fire Club. 
Neither patricians nor plebeians were to be taught 
morality by that young sprig of ignoble nobility. 
Wresting a couplet of Dryden's to the purpose, it might 
be said of him and of them, 

" Yet they refused (nor could he take offence) 
His glutton kind should teach them abstinence." 

Stormy was J:he laughter in the House when John 



CORPULENCE COMPLAIXIXG OF A CROWD. 

Hampden, — not merely the grandson of the great leader 
of the Long Parliament, but himself a man who boasted 
of having conspired with Algernon Sidney against the 
royal family, — used the word republican (as against 
Halifax) as a term of reproach. Swift has a tale within 
a Tale (of a Tub) of a fat unwieldy fellow, half stifled in 
the press of a throng which a mountebank in Leicester 
Fields had drawn about him, and crying out against the 
filthy crowd, protesting against the squeezing of the 
rabble rout, denouncing elbow-thrusts in particular and 
the foul air in general ; till at last a weaver, that stood 
next the overgrown grumbler, could hold no longer, 
but "confounded" him as the biggest offender of them 
all : Who else helped to make up the crowd half so much 
as his corpulent self? Couldn't he see that he took up 
more room with that huge carcase of his than any five 
other men ? Was he the man to vituperate until he 
brought his own corporation within reasonable compass ? 
The Dean's faithful version of the weaver's racy diction 
is a trifle too coarse for literal transcription. Nor, per- 
$, is every phrase presentable in his apostrophe to 
beam-eyed lady-censors who assail their own sex with 
such acliarncmcnt : 

;•, foolish females, bold and blind, 
, by what fatal turn of mind 
i on vices most severe 
Wherein you have the greatest share ? 
Thus every fool herself dehld 

• rudes condemn the absent prudes ; . . . 
While crooked Cynthia sneering 

It Florimd wears iron BtS 
Chloe, of every coxcomb jealous, 
Admires how girls can talk with folio.-. 

. full of indignation, frets 

That women should be such coquettes .... 
And Rufa, with her combs of lead, 
Whispers that Sappho's hair is red : 



536 FAULTY FAULT-FINDERS. 

Aura, whose tongue you hear a mile hence, 
Talks half a day in praise of silence ; 
And Sylvia, full of inward guilt, 
Calls Amoret an arrant jilt." 

Fenelon spiritnellement says that " c'est par imperfec- 
tion qu'on reprend les imparfaits. C'est tin amour-pro- 
pre subtil et penetrant qui ne pardonne rien a Pamour- 
propre d'autrui. Plus il est amour-propre, plus il est 
severe censeur. . . . Les passions d'autrui paraissent 
infmiment ridicules et insupportables a quiconque est 
livre aux siennes." Delicate as Fenelon was, such pas- 
sages as this show how easy it would have been for him, 
as Sainte-Beuve says, to be malin and satirique. 

For Milton to complain of "evil tongues," in Johnson's 
opinion, required impudence at least equal to his other 
powers ; " Milton, whose warmest advocates must allow 
that he never spared any asperity of reproach or bru- 
tality of insolence." But, as in Prior's Alma, 

" I find, quoth Mat, reproof is vain : 
Who first offend will first complain." 

Macaulay taxes Johnson, who so frequently blamed 
Shakspeare for neglecting the proprieties of time and 
place, and for ascribing to one age or nation the man- 
ners and opinions of another, with sinning quite as 
grievously in the same way, in the story of Rasselas. 
Horace Walpole finds it diverting to hear Lord Mel- 
combe (Bubb Dodington) rail in his Diary at Lord 
Halifax and others, for the very kind of double-dealing 
which he relates coolly of himself in the next page ; and 
alleges, that had he gone backwards, he might have 
given half-a-dozen volumes of his own life, with similar 
anecdotes and variations. 

Not in Pope's Dunciad only, but out of it, far and 
wide, 



ALL ALIVE TO THE RIDICULOUS— IX OTHERS. 537 

" Kind Self-conceit to some her glass applies, 
Which no one looks in with another's eyes." 

It is as with Whiffle in Churchill — the contrast be- 
tween what he was in his own sight and what in that of 
the world : a little lower than the human, 

" Such Whiffle came, and such was seen 
In the world's eye ; but (strange to tell !) 
Misled by Fancy's magic spell, 
Was more than human in his own.'' 

My Lady Dowager, in Esmond, when commenting on 
the alleged disfigurement of young Lady Castlewood's 
face, from small-pox, " turned to her looking-glass and 
examined her own old wrinkled countenance in it with 
such a grin of satisfaction, that it was all her guests 
could do to refrain from laughing in her ancient face.'" 
When Goldsmith's Bee essayist, avowedly aged sixty- 
two, saunters into the Fark with Cousin Hannah, four 
years his elder, their antiquated figures soon attract the 
eyes of the company, — the politer part smiling, and "the 
vulgar" bursting into a horse-laugh at their grotesque 
appearance. Cousin Hannah, being perfectly assured of 
the point-device propriety of her own make-up, attri- 
butes all this mirth to the oddity of her companion's 
look, while he as cordially places the whole to her 
account. Cuthbcrt Gurney's zest in laughing at the 
ridiculous things told him of his acquaintance by a 
tattling doctor, incites his brother to remind him that 
probably " zee, 11 in our turns, with all our little foil 
and failings, mental and bodily, become equally subjects 

of amusement for everybody else in the neighbourhood." 
" Ah, well/' says Cuthbert, "there is something in that, 
to be sure, that D truck me before : but what h 

we about its that can be laughed at?" Mr. Windham, 
after examining Warren Hastings for some time, at tin 
trial, told Fanny Burney he did not at all like his face; 



538 l WAD SOME POW'R THE GIFTIE GIE US 

and Miss was more than a little tickled by the fact that 
the two statesmen were reckoned extremely like one 
another. Queen Caroline's enumeration of certain 
physical defects which ought to have rendered impossible 
the liaison between Sir Robert Walpole and Miss Sker- 
rett, and which culminated in the compassionate reflec- 
tion, "Ah, what is human nature ! " moved Lord Hervey 
to note down that " while she was saying this, she little 
reflected in what degree she herself possessed all the 
impediments and antidotes to love she had been enu- 
merating, and that ' Ah, what is human nature ! ' was 
as applicable to her own blindness/' Henri Beyle 
(De Stendhal) somewhere declares c'est une legon, the 
way in which the ugliest clumsiest people will contrive se 
faire illusion of their figure and face : even cultivated 
folks who study fine portraits manage to effect a 
total abstraction of all defects in the face before them, 
when they are tying on their cravat or brushing their 
hair. 

" O wad some pow'r the giftie gie us 
To see oursels as ithers see us V 

For that, presumably, would from many a blunder free 
us, and foolish notion. Strange it is, muses Sir 
Thomas Browne, that in the most perfect sense there 
should be so many fallacies ; but the greatest im- 
perfection is in our inward sight, "that is, to be ghosts 
unto our own eyes ; and while we are so sharp-sighted 
as to look through others, to be invisible unto our- 
selves ; for the inward eyes are more fallacious than 
the outward." The vices we scoff at in others, he goes 
on to say, laugh at us within ourselves : avarice, pride, 
falsehood, lie undiscovered and blindly in us, even to 
the age of blindness ; and therefore, to see ourselves 
interiorly, we are fain to borrow other men's eyes ; 
wherein true friends are good informers, and censurers 



TO SEE OURSELS AS ITHERS SEE US P 539 

no bad friends. La Fontaine is as good to point a 
moral as to adorn a tale, or a fable : 

" Lynx envcrs nos pareils, et taupes envcrs nous, 
Nous nous pardonnons tout, ct rien aux autres hommes : 
On se voit d'un autre ceil qu'on ne voit son prochain." 

Adam Smith calls this self-deceit, this fatal weakness 
of mankind, the source of half the disorders of human 
life. "If we saw ourselves in the light in which others 
see us, or in which they would see us if they knew all, 
a reformation would generally be unavoidable. We 
could not otherwise endure the sight." But thus may 
we see how the world wags, wags on in the old way : 

" Crimina qui cernunt aliorum, non sua cernunt, 
Hi sapiunt aliis, desipiuntque sibi." 

Too many, says Archbishop Leighton, take the ready 
course to deceive themselves ; for they look with both 
eyes on the failings and defects of others, and scarcely 
give their good qualities half an eye, while, on the 
contrary, in themselves, they study to the full their 
own merits, and their weaknesses and defects they 
skip over, as children do their hard words in a lesson : 
" making this uneven parallel, what wonder if the re- 
sult be a gross mistake of themselves!" Cowper brings 
the like charge, in well-sounding verse: 

"Their own defects, invisible to them, 

Seen in another, they at once Condemn; 

And though self idolized in ever\ • 

Hate their own likme^s in a brother's lace." 

The humorist in the Spectator In in :lur at 

dinner half-a-dozen of his friends wh<> are each of them 

notorious [<>v inserting redundant phrases in their dis- 
course; and each of the guests making frequent use of 
his pet expletive, his "D'ye bear me/ 1 "D'yi 

"And so, sir," etc., he appears SO ridiculous to his 
neighbours, that each comes to reflect upon himself as 



540 SEEING OURSELVES 

appearing equally ridiculous to the rest of the company. 
The reason assigned for Swift's Yahoos hating one 
another more than they did any different species of 
animals, is, the odiousness of their own shapes, which all 
could see in the rest, but not in themselves. At the 
conclusion of his Scheme to make an Hospital for In- 
curables, the Dean owns himself happy in the reflection, 
that although in that short treatise the characters of 
many thousands are contained among the vast variety 
of incurables, yet not any one person is likely to be 
offended ; because it is natural to apply ridiculous cha- 
racters to all the world except ourselves. And he is 
bold to affirm, that the most incurable fool, knave, 
scold, coxcomb, scribbler, or liar, in the whole nation, 
will sooner enumerate the circle of their acquaintance as 
addicted to those distempers than once imagine them- 
selves any way qualified for such an hospital. A later 
Swift proposes thanksgiving to God for imparting to us 
poor weak mortals the inestimable blessing of vanity — 
upon which food, and scarcely any other, so many half- 
witted votaries of the arts, for instance, on his showing, 
subsist ; for, if the delusion were to drop from their 
eyes, and they should see themselves as they are, what 
could they do but just walk off Waterloo Bridge, and 
there an end ? 

An essayist on Folly surmises, that if required to 
name one unfailing characteristic of a fool, he should 
incline to name the want of power to see himself and 
his doings reflected in the mind of others. Confessedly 
it is given to none to know with absolute correctness 
how we stand in the thoughts of others ; but in the case 
of the foolish body there is an utter gulf between his 
idea of himself and the consent of mankind concerning 
him. And defending mankind from the indiscriminate 
charge by mere satirists of pervading folly, because 



AS OTHERS SEE US. 541 

they are occasionally foolish, the essayist submits as a 
proper test, Do they ever wake to a consciousness of 
having played the fool ? For, no man, he contends, 
who is ever thoroughly, deeply, heart and soul, ashamed 
of himself, who comes to a sense of the true nature of 
his own folly, and sees it with other men's eyes, should 
be classed among the irreclaimable. The real fool is 
defined to be he who never regrets the right thing or 
for the right reason, and under no circumstances sees 
himself as others see him. 

Mr. Windham, in his Adversaria, vents a thousand 
pities on the impossibility of a man's, for a while, 
standing at a distance from himself, and inspecting his 
own person, manner, behaviour, and character, with the 
eye of a stranger. " What a pity that no one can see 
himself as he is seen by every one else!" It is from 
this impossibility that one meets people every day who 
arc as perfect strangers to their own characters as a 
man would be to his own countenance who had never 
-.ecu the reflection of it in a mirror. In this latter pre- 
dicament, as the reflective statesman phrases it, " few 
can be found ; art, incited by vanity, having furnished 
US with such ready means of viewing our own persons. 
But there is no mirror that can, at one view, give us a 
distinct image of our characters." Even if there were, 
might not the result too often be that of the fast-fading 
impression in St. James's similitude,- -the case of a man 
beholding his natural face in a glass, who, going his 
way, Straightway forgetteth what manner of man he- 
was? The desiderated image of character is only to 
be formed, by our statesman's reckoning, like tlie map 
of some of tlie planets, from the result <»f observations 
made with pain and difficult}-, and at various time.; — 
for which reason few people ever form it at all, but 
remain in such total ignorance of the appearance of 



542 SEEING OURSELVES 

their own characters, as seen from without, that nothing- 
is more common than to hear a man arraigning in 
others the very faults for which he is himself most 
notorious, and treating his own favourite follies, the 
very vices of his own bosom, with as much severity as 
if he had not the remotest kinship with them. "You 
talk of pride!" Menenius Agrippa exclaims, address- 
ing the pair of tribunes who so stir his patrician bile : 
" Oh that you could turn your eyes towards the napes 
of your necks, and make but an interior survey of your 
good selves ! Oh that you could !" 

" Brutus. What then, sir. 
Menen. Why, then you should discover a brace of unmeriting, 
proud, violent, testy magistrates, (alias, fools,) as any in 
Rome." 

Menenius had asked them before in what enormity 
was his favourite Marcius poor that they twain, Brutus 
and Sicinius, had not in abundance ; and Brutus had 
pronounced Caius Marcius to be poor in no one fault, 
but stored with all. " Especially in pride," quoth 
Sicinius; "and topping all others in boasting," adds 
his colleague ; thus provoking Menenius to the retort, 
" This is strange now : Do you two know how you are 
censured here in the city," in respect of pride and 
boasting ? And then follows his plain-spoken invective 
against them as a brace of stuck-up asses, for whom 
his one wish was that they could but once, and once 
for all, see themselves as others saw them. Baltimore, 
in the comedy of The Election, provokes his more sen- 
sible wife to laughter by his vehement onset against the 
detested Freeman, especially declaring the very gait and 
shape of his legs to be insufferable : " People, you must 
know, have taken it into their heads that there is a 
resemblance between you and him. I have myself, in 
twilight, sometimes mistaken the one for the other." 



AS OTHERS SEE US. 543 

Rather in midnight, the angry man suggests : people 
must be blind idiots : he could kick his own shins if 
he thought they had the smallest resemblance to that 
fellow's. 

Not only as critic but as patriot was Jean Paul 
Richter for returning thanks to Madame de Stael in 
his review of her book on Germany ; for it is not the 
outward man, said he, but the inward, that needs mir- 
rors, and we cannot wholly see ourselves, except in the 
of a foreign seer. The reviewer asserted ^iow 
happy he would be to see and enter a picture-gallery, 
or hall of mirrors, and see his countrymen's faces limned 
by quite different nations, — "where we might learn how 
differently we look to eyes that were different." 

When John Riley, who, diffident and unassuming as 
he was, stepped into Sir Peter Lely's place, and secured 
Sir Peter's patrons, upon the death of that well-patron- 
'. painter, he was introduced to Charles the Second, 
and commissioned to paint his majesty's portrait ; on 
seeing which, the Merry Monarch with frank good- 
nature exclaimed, "Is that like me? Then, od's-fish, 
it's an ugly-looking fellow I am!" Right royal is this 
superiority to the narrow vision typified in La Bruyere's 

elderly coquette, who studies her past-forty face in the 
glass, and while she lays on the rouge and the mouches 
and the powder, talks away against the silly bodies 

piarante ans who affect I ill juvenile, and pro- 

ts that positively Clarice i> ridiculous, too ridiculous, 

tc ses mouches ct sou We mortals sometimes 

cut a pitiable figure in our attempts at display, 111 U 

the observant author of MiddUmarch: we may be sure 
of our own merits, yet fatally ignorant of the point 

view from which we ar led by our neighbours, 

"Our fine patterns in tattooing may be far from throw- 
ing him into a of admiration, though we turn 



544 SEEING OURSELVES AS OTHERS SEE US. 

ourselves all round to show them." And the same 
shrewdly sagacious student of character asks, in another 
work, what mortal is there of us all, who would find his 
satisfaction enhanced by an opportunity of comparing 
the picture he presents to himself of his own doings, 
with the picture they make on the mental retina of his 
neighbours ? We see nothing behind us, Montaigne 
says : we mock ourselves a hundred times a day, when 
we deride our neighbour, and detest in others the 
defeats which are more manifest in us, and wonder at 
them with "a marvellous unconsciousness and impu- 
dence." "Oh, the heavens!" is Violenzia's exclamation 
to the King, in Roscoe's tragedy, — 

" How basely dare men write themselves; would you 
Might hear another speak as you do now, 
You would condemn him for the most debased 
That ever yet left blushing." 

It is, indeed, characteristic of Leigh Hunt to demur 
to the presumed advantage of seeing ourselves as others 
see us ; and very like him to ask who would wish to 
have deprived the uncouth old Scotch pedagogue of 
that burst of extravagant self-complacency with which 
he turned Roderick Random round and round, survey- 
ing him from head to foot with such infinite surprise 
and inextinguishable laughter, and breaking into ges- 
tures and exclamations supremely oafish and absurd. 
When our follies afford equal delight to ourselves and 
those about us, argues this kindly sophist, what is there 
to be desired more ? It is better, he submits, to have a 
contempt for any one than for ourselves. His philoso- 
phy would, in this mood, have refrained from urging the 
appeal of the Queen to Constance in Mr. Browning's 
dramatic fragment : 

" Dear, make me see it. Do you see it so ? 
None see themselves — another sees them best." 



XLIX. 

ONE TO SO IV, ANOTHER TO REAP. 

St. John iv. 37. 

SITTING at Jacob's well, conversing with His dis- 
ciples, and pointing to the fields that were white 
already to harvest, our Lord told them, as by a para- 
ble, that He had sent them to reap that whereon they 
had bestowed no labour : other men laboured, and 
they reaped the product, or entered into their labours, 
and enjoyed the fruit of them. " And herein is that 
saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth." It is 
an elementary principle in equity, and it is apostolic 
doctrine, that the husbandman that laboureth must be 
first partaker, or the first to partake, of the fruits. But 
in the common law of facts in this worky-day world, it 
IS not so ; not so invariably, or without very many and 
very markwoithy exceptions. What is denounced in 
the prophecies of Micah as a retributory threat, is often 
fulfilled in fact as an ethical anomaly, — u Thou slialt 
sow, but thou shalt not reap ; thou slialt tread the 
t, but thou shalt not anoint thee with oil ; and 
sweet wine, but shalt not drink wine." He that labour- 
eth, laboureth for himself, for his mouth craveth it of 
him, says one of the proverbs of Solomon ; but this law 
of labour not always holds good, but ever and anon is 

love's labour lost The labourer finds he has Dot la- 
boured fur himself, but for others ; and what his mouth 
craveth of him is reserved for other mouths. Si 
not VoblS — e\ birds build nests that shall not be 

for themselves, and bees make honey that shall be the 
beem ind oxen bear the yoke for man's profit, 

and sheep fleeces of which the}' shall be fleeced. 

N N 



546 OXE TO SOW, AXOTHER TO REAP. 

It is of the new heaven and the new earth that the 
greatest of the greater prophets is speaking when he 
gives utterance to the promise, " They shall not build, 
and another inhabit ; they shall not plant, and another 
eat/' but shall enjoy the work of their own hands, and 
shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble. 
And elsewhere the promise was deemed worthy of a 
Divine oath, Jehovah swearing by His right hand, and 
by the arm of His strength, " Surely I will no more give 
thy corn to be meat for thine enemies ; and the sons 
of the stranger shall not drink thy wine, for the which 
thou hast laboured." The deprecating imprecation, so 
to speak, of the protesting Man of Uz was, that if he 
was faulty to the extent and in the manner alleged, 
" Then let me sow, and another eat." And as it was 
the signal privilege of the children of Israel, as Moses 
apprised them in recounting their blessings, that the 
Lord their God would give them, in the promised land, 
great and goodly cities which they builded not, and 
houses full of all good things which they filled not, and 
wells digged which they digged not, and vineyards and 
olive-trees which they planted not ; so was the warning 
sounded in their ears, at another time, but by the same 
voice of depth and power and consecration, that, — if un- 
faithful to their vows, and regardless of their high call- 
ing, — they should plant vineyards and dress them, but 
should neither drink of the wine nor gather the grapes ; 
and though possessing olive-trees throughout all. their 
coasts, they should not anoint themselves with the oil* 

The historian of the Conquest of Mexico tells us of 
that Velasquez whose name is so often conjoined with 
that of Cortez, and whose life was a series of errors, that 

* Cf. 2 Tim. ii. 6; Micah vi. 15; Isaiah L\v. 22, Ixii. S, 9; Job 
xxxi. 8 ; Prov. xvi. 26 ; Deut. vi. II, xxviii. 38 seq. 



SIC VOS NON VOBIS. 547 

he proposed others should fight his battles, and he win 
the laurels ; that others should make discoveries, and he 
reap the fruits of them. The account by Tacitus of the 
Battle of the Grampians has been said to be chiefly- 
interesting for the glimpse it reveals of Roman tactics 
(under Agricola) at that period : all the loss and danger 
must fall upon the Batavians, the Usipians, the Gauls 
and Spaniards ; but when the day is won by the blood 
of her subjects, it is Rome that reaps the profit, and 
the legions of Rome that reap the glory, and acquire 
the titles of Rapacious and Invincible, Apollinean and 
Minervian. My lord of Leicester pens his plaint from 
the Netherlands in 15S5 : "But so is the hap of some, 
that all they do is nothing ; and others that do nothing, 
do all, and have all the thanks." Sic vos uoii vobis melli- 
ficatis apes. 

" Little dost thou think, thou busy, busy bee, 

What is the end of thy toil. 
When the latest flowers of the ivy are gone, 
And all thy work for the year is done, 

Thy master comes for the spoil." 

Mr. Pecksniffs pupils draw clever plans, and he 
appropriates the profit and the praise. Given the time 
when ;i new idea can be pressed with a hope of practical 
succe.vs, it is seldom the man who first starts it who | 

the credit of it; "another steppeth down before" the 

original prophet, and wins the success and credit which 

should rightly have been his: the first mover therefore 
is laughed at as an "idea-monger/ 1 while tin* second 

comes in for the honours of a "successful ivf< unier.'' 
Happy the unselfish sown' lu-side all water, t ii.it cm 
say with the philosophic poet, applying it to himself: — 
•• if thou have thrown a glorious thought 

I 'pon life's common ways, 
Should other men the gain liave caught, 
Fret not to lo^e the praise.'' 



548 ONE SOWETH AND ANOTHER RE APE TIT. 

The financial story of the Great Eastern steamship 
was accepted by meditative journalists as a signal illus- 
tration of the melancholy and pathetic law, that all great 
benefactors of their kind who happen to be in advance 
of their times are only rewarded with failure and ruin. 
There was the golden grain ; but what about the patient 
oxen — the original Atlantic Telegraph shareholders ? It 
is a common saying, that projectors are in general ruined, 
while others make fortunes on the foundation laid by 
the inventors. Dr. Newman speaks of it as " notorious," 
that those who first suggest the most happy inventions, 
and open a way to the secret stores of nature ; those 
who weary themselves in the search after truth, who 
strike out momentous principles of action, who painfully 
force upon their contemporaries the adoption of bene- 
ficial measures, or are the original cause of the chief 
events in national history, are commonly supplanted, as 
regards celebrity and reward, by inferior men. " Their 
works are not called after them, nor the arts and sys- 
tems which they have given the world." Their schools, 
he adds, are usurped by strangers ; and their maxims of 
wisdom circulate among the children of their people, 
forming, perhaps, a nation's character, but not embalm- 
ing in their own immortality the names of their original 
authors. 

" Young children gather as their own 
The harvest that the dead have sown — 
The dead, forgotten and unknown." * 

Mr. Buckle was thinking of himself when he pictured 
the philosophic historian laying the foundation of the 
science of history, while it would be for his successors 
to raise the edifice : " Their hands will give the last 
touch ; they will reap the glory ; their names will be 

* Arthur Hugh Clough. 



SIC VOS NON VOBIS. 549 

remembered when his is forgotten." Like Ovid's apples, 
Nostra quoquc consita quondam, Scd noil ct nostra poma 
Ugenda manu. Like the labourers in Mr. Matthew 
Arnold's Sick King in Bokhara : — 

"And these all, labouring for a lord, 
Eat not the fruit of their own hands : 
Which is the heaviest of all plagues 
To that man's mind who understands." 

Columbus sails through the weedy seas, and, as Mr. 
Dallas words it, rasps his prow upon a western isle : the 
mariner who follows in his wake lights on the mainland, 
and calls it after himself— America. Another com- 
mentator on this trite text has more recently dismissed 
it with the reflection, that it were impertinence to enlarge 
on so patent a truism, or to illustrate anew this dull 
commonplace of moralists. 

When Joab had fought successfully against Rabbah, 
he sent messengers to David, desiring him to advance 
With his host, and encamp against the city, and take it ; 
u lest I take the city, and it be called after my name." 
The general is seen to advantage in such a message, 

Some commanders of high note have unduly appropri- 
ated the gains of others, by them superseded, or on their 

account To take the management of any affair of public 
Concern from the man who has almost brought it t 1 a 

conclusion, is justly, as Adam Smith observes, regarded 

as the most invidious injustice: as he had done so much, 

he should, one thinks, have been allowed to acquire the 

complete merit of putting a finish to it. u It was ob- 
jected to 1'ompcy, that he came upon the Victories of 
Lucullus, and gathered those laurels which were due to 
the fortune and valour of another. 11 So again Plutarch 
relates of Mctellus, th.it he was overcome with grief and 
resentment, to think that when he had in a measure 



550 REAPING THE HARVEST 

finished the war in Africa, and there remained nothing 
to take but the person of Jugurtha, Marius, who had 
raised himself merely by his ingratitude towards him, 
should come to snatch away both his victory and his 
triumph. And in the Life of Marcus Crassus the same 
biographer shrewdly indicates the annoyance that com- 
mander felt at having written to the Senate that it was 
necessary to recall Lucullus from Thrace, and Pompey 
from Spain, to put down Spartacus and his host, now 
that he saw his way clear to end the conflict himself : 
" For he was sensible that the general who should come 
to his assistance, would rob him of all the honour." 
Aufidius, in Shakspeare, denouncing Caius Marcius, 
plumes himself on having 

" holp to reap the fame 

Which he did end all his ; and took some pride 
To do myself this wrong : till, at the last, 
I seem'd his follower, not partner ; and 
He waged me with his countenance,* as if 
I had been mercenary." 

A more cynical schemer is York, in King Henry VI., 
who thus proposes to profit by the military successes 
(hypothetical) of the counterfeit Mortimer : 

" Say that he thrive, (as 'tis great like he will,) 
Why, then from Ireland come I with my strength, 
And reap the harvest which that rascal sow'd." 

The approved system with Lewis XIV. and his 
generals during a campaign, was for his Majesty to keep 
at a safe distance till success was sure, and then to put in 
an appearance with all the honours. In various ways 
the system has been practically an approved one with 
divers monarchs, little as well as conventionally great 
Mr. Fonblanque had George IV. in view (not dreaming 
however of the pet Waterloo myth) when he found occa- 

* Thought me sufficiently rewarded with approving looks. 



THAT OTHER HAXDS HAVE SOWN. 551 

sion once to remark, in his caustic style, that before we 
give luxurious kings the glory of successes which are 
brought about under their reigns, we should, for consist- 
ency, accord them divine honours, and suppose them to 
have directed the secondary causes and circumstances 
which have part in great events. 

Balfour of Burley is bitter against Henry Morton on 
the supposed score of supersession : he, Burley, has 
watched, fought, plotted, striven for the reduction of the 
beleaguered fort ; and now, when the men are about to 
yield themselves to his hand, " cometh this youth, with- 
out a beard on his chin, and takes it on him to thrust 
his sickle into the harvest, and to rend the prey from 
the spoiler! Surely the labourer is worthy of his hire, 
and the city, with its captives, should be given to him 
that wins it ? " That is a fine stroke on the part of the 
Douglas when speeding with his train to relieve Ran- 
dolph, at the moment sorely beset and outnumbered, 
in the Lord of the Isles; but abruptly bidding his nun 
hold them still as they near the combat, for tide of battle 
has turned, and Randolph is already recovering his lost 
ground : 

>, sec ! tl fly ! 

Earl hath von the victory . . . 

in up ; our would impair 

Come too late to share." 
The cause of General Webb's leaving the army in 

.that the- signal victmy he gained over the 
French under La Motto in 1708 was, by the Duke of 
Marlbor tary, in his letter written to England, 

I to the Duke's favourite, 0, who dill n<»t 

come up till after the 1 :<nt. Swift hail this in 

mind, when, in his t; n The Art of Political Lying % 

he said that, " even upon a good occasion, a man may 

be robbed of his victory \>y a person that did not com- 



552 BEGINNING TO BUILD, 

mand in the action." Biographers of Sir Henry Have- 
lock tell us of that victory at Istaliff which was entirely 
his own, the conduct of the operation having been 
abandoned to him by his commander, General McCaskill, 
the plan of it drawn out by him, and the execution of 
the plan left in his hands, — that nevertheless it was 
General McCaskill who received the Cross of the Bath 
for it. The Tancred of Tasso speaks for, and speaks 
home to, many when he utters the protesting plaint : 

" Cilicia conquer'd I, as all men wot, 

And there the glorious cross on high I reared : 
But Baldwin came, and what I nobly got 
Bereft me falsely, when I least him fear'd." 



L. 

BEGINNING TO BUILD, AND NOT ABLE TO 
FINISH. 

St. Luke xiv. 30. 

HE that would build a tower, or turreted mansion, 
courts mockery and derision if he begins the 
work before he has counted, or calculated, the cost, to 
satisfy himself of having means at command to make 
an end of what he has begun. He " sitteth down first," 
(like ^Eneas, sedet secumque volutat) deliberately to 
make his reckoning, and to be sure that his funds will 
carry him through the work. And this he will do lest 
haply his towering enterprise become a byword on the 
lips of men, and his fragmentary edifice a standing jest. 
" Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is 
not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock 
him, saying, This man began to build, and was not able 
to finish." And it is the very reverse of what Persius 



AND XOT ABLE TO FIXISH. 553 

calls pukhrum, digito monstrari ct dicier: Hie est, in 
that sort of way. 

In one of his Moral Philosophy lectures Sydney Smith 
dilates on the large amount of talent that is lost to the 
world through timidity and over-calculation, and for 
want of a little courage. The fact is, he urges, that in 
order to do anything in this world worth doing, we must 
not stand shivering on the bank, and thinking of the 
cold and danger, but jump in and scramble through as 
well as we can. "It will not do to be perpetually calcu- 
lating risks and adjusting nice chances : it did all very 
well before the Flood, when a man could consult his 
friends upon an intended publication for a hundred and 
fifty years, and then live to see its success for six or 
seven centuries afterwards ; but at present a man waits, 
and doubts, and hesitates, and consults his brother, and 
his uncle, and his first cousins, and his particular friends, 
till one fine day he finds that he is sixty-five years of 
a g e >" — arj d that, in short, he has lost so much time in 
consulting first cousins and particular friends, that he 
has no more time left to follow their advice. That is one 
side of the question. Another is the undertaking a Lai 
scheme, like the late Mr. Buckle, or even like Lord 
Macaulay, and leaving it, or having to have it, cut short, 
comparatively very short indeed, by death. Another is 
the beginning a work on a moderate plan enough, and 
anon finding - hands beyond all man 1 

ment or control. Dr. John Scott professed to have 
found by experience that writing is like build: 
"wherein the undertaker, to supply . or 

serve some convenience which al not, i^ 

illy fore I his first model and pi 

ami many times to double the charge and expense of it." 
Intellectual ambition is indeed tl 



554 HUGE LITERARY SCHEMES. 

istic of almost all men of genius ; their works are often 
conceived upon a plan so vast and magnificent that the 
limits of human life and energy are insufficient for their 
completion, and hence it is that so many enterprises 
remain unachieved for long periods of time, tempting by 
turns the great men of many successive generations 
Here and there, it is admitted, a scheme like Gibbon's 
may succeed under peculiarly favourable circumstances ; 
but, generally speaking, in this country, such plans are 
thwarted either by the death or by the immersion in 
active life of those who undertake them ; and it has 
therefore been suggested as desirable, that, in choosing 
the subjects of books intended to be the labour of a 
lifetime, somewhat less regard should be paid to the 
importance of the plan, and somewhat more to the 
probability of its accomplishment. Est quoddam prodire 
tenus, si non datur ultra, as Horace has it. But man 
is apt to scheme ultra vires. As La Fontaine depicts 
him, — and La Fontaine knew his man ; that is to say, 
knew men, — 

" L'homme est ainsi bati : quand un sujet l'enflamme, 
L'impossibilite disparait a son ame. 
Combien fait-il de vceux, combien perd-il de pas ! . . . 
Si j'apprenais l'hebreu, les sciences, Thistoire ! 

Tout cela, c'est la mer a boire ; 

Mais rien a l'homme ne sumt. 
Pour fournir aux projets que forme un seul esprit, 
II faudrait quatre corps ; encor loin d'y suffire, 
A mi-chemin je crois que tous demeureraient : 
Quatre Methusalem bout a bout ne pourraient 

Mettre a fin ce qu'un seul ddsire." 

Bishop Warburton, that man with the monstrous appe- 
tite and the very bad digestion, as Bentley characterized 
him, is best known by a book — or rather, nowadays, by 
the name of a book, The Divine Legation, — the original 
fault of which is traced to the inordinate scale of the 



HIS TORY OF CIV I LIZ A TIOX. 5 5 5 

design ; for he aspired to comprise in it all Gentile 
philosophy, and the Hebrew and Christian schemes of 
religion and ethics. He might as well, it has been said, 
have undertaken to write a universal history like Bos- 
suet's, and a history of philosophy like Brucker's, com- 
bining with them Cudworth's Intellectual System and 
Bacon's Novum Organum. Mr. Buckle recanted in his 
second volume the conviction implied, if not explicitly 
avowed in his first, that such a history of civilization as 
he designed was within his individual means of accom- 
plishment, lie had already come to see, and to own, 
that such a work required, not only several minds, but 
also the successive experience of several generations. 
" Once, I own, I thought otherwise. Once, when I 
caught sight of the whole field of knowledge, and 
seemed, however dimly, to discern its various parts and 
the relation they bore to each other, I was so entranced 
with its surpassing beauty, that the judgment was 
beguiled, and I deemed myself able, not only to cover 
the surface, but also t<> master the details." Little did 
he know how the horizon enlarges as well as recedes, 
and how vainly we grasp at the fleeting forms, which 
melt away and elude us in the distance. Of all that he 
had hop* (1 to do, he now found but too sun.lv how small 
apart he should accomplish; and yet, not Suspecting 
how mar \\;i. his end, he had not found h"\v much 

smaller than the smallest of his amended expectations 
the quotient was really to be. In those early aspirations 
of his, there was, he confessed, much that was fanciful, 
perhaps foolish, perhaps even morally wrong, as savour- 

of an arrogance which belongs to a fcrength that 

refuses to recognise it- own weakness, It was painful, 

he went on tO Say, "to make this COnfeS i"ii ; but I <>wc 

it to the reader, because I would not have him to suppose 

that either in this, <>r in the future volumes [there were 



556 ASPIRA TION AND ACHIEVEMENT. 

to be none] of my History, I shall be able to redeem my 
pledge, and to perform all that I promised." Something 
he hoped to achieve ; but it would be only a fragment of 
his original design. That something it was denied him 
to achieve ; and dying, delirious, in a strange land, 
" Oh, my book, my book, I shall never finish my book !" 
he wailed ; himself so weak, his ruling passion so strong 
in death. His scheme reminds us of what Bacon wrote 
at thirty-one, in a letter to his uncle Lord Burleigh, " I 
have taken all knowledge to be my province." In a like 
spirit Vicq d'Azyr answered the cold query of criticism, 
Pourquoi faire tant de choses a la fois ? In a like 
spirit Francis Horner set about his System of the Princi- 
ples of Philosophical Inquiry— accounting no presump- 
tion to be culpable while it only stimulates to great 
undertakings ; though admitting that it becomes exces- 
sive when there is a ridiculous inadequacy of what is 
performed, in contrast with what is attempted. Looking 
about for a possible English Muratori, and hoping to 
have found one in John Pinkerton, Gibbon disposed of 
the objection that the work laid out for him would sur- 
pass the powers of a single man, and that industry is 
best promoted by the division of labour, by replying that 
Mr. Pinkerton seemed one of the children of an almost 
extinct race of heroes, capable of hardest assiduous study, 
and with warm inclination on the side of duty ; that he 
was, too, in the vigour of age and health ; and that the 
most voluminous of our historical collections was the 
most speedily finished by the diligence of Muratori alone. 
Gibbon's own completion of his enormous design stands 
out a spectacle for all time. For one such achieved 
plan there are scores of broken-off or broken-down 
ones ; and many a lesser light than Mr. Mure of Cald- 
well has better deserved the remonstrance set up by 
reviewers of the first four volumes of that scholar's 



GREA T EXPECT A TIOXS FOILED. 5 5 7 

Literature of Ancient Greece, when they professed to 
look forward with blank dismay to the region still to be 
traversed ; and when they said they knew not what 
compact the Laird of Caldwell might have made with 
destiny for enjoying a life beyond that which is usually 
accorded to man ; but that however favoured he might 
be, his readers would still be exposed to the ordinary 
infirmities of the race. 

But let us pass on to illustrate the text of broken 
plans or promises from another point of view. It has 
been said to be as great a puzzle to know what becomes 
of all the promising young men, as it was to the little girl 
of the story where on earth (or under it) all the bad people 
were buried. And one great secret of the exaggerated 
notions entertained about promising youths is shown 
to be the confusion of conduct with capacity, of good- 
- with power. Intellectual intrepidity, as it is one of 
the most vital conditions of eminent success, is just that 
at which men of promise ordinarily stop short of fulfil- 
ment : u With manful assurance they march up to the 
fight, but discretion suddenly steps in and freezes their 
intent" Not seldom we are mistaken about a man 
having failed : the fault was our own in expecting I 
much — and these expectations are declared to be, in 
nine ca f ten, the effect of supposing that what 

anybody ha ion for, that he has all the capacity 

ittaining. And then again, " men with the best aims 
constantly break down because they cannot bring their 
great minds SO 1<<v. .:1s and items and little de- 

tad of labour and forethought." Pe >ple break 

because the} I take pains with their 

character, as they would with their ' if they were 

ing to fight or run a race: the)- do nut " keep them- 
selves in moral training." As St. Taul tells the (j 



553 PROMISING YOUTH: 

tians, they did run well for a time ; what hath hindered 
them? 

An eminent writer has said that there is hardly a 
sadder feeling than that which arises from a contrast of 
our early ennobling aspirations with our final miserable 
realities, our low confessions of weakness, our small- 
voiced defence of the fear or the wile that has tempted 
us from the highway, which we thought would lead us to 
all things. " How few are there who, starting in youth, 
animated by great motives, do not, at thirty, seem to 
have suffered a 'second fall'!" There is an apophthegm 
in one of Hawthorne's early books, having made which, 
" Let me die upon it," said he, " for I shall never make 
a truer one;" and this is it: that when fate would 
gently disappoint the world, it takes away the hope- 
fullest mortals in their youth ; — when it would laugh 
the world's hopes to scorn, it lets them live. In a 
later and riper work he moralizes on the number we 
meet with of young men for whom we anticipate 
wonderful things, but of whom, even after much and 
careful inquiry, we never happen to hear another word. 
The effervescence of youth and passion, he says, and 
the fresh gloss of the intellect and imagination, endow 
them with a false brilliancy, which makes fools of them- 
selves and other people. " Like certain chintzes, calicoes, 
and ginghams, they show finely in their first newness, 
but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very 
sober aspect after washing-day." Many are the extra- 
ordinary young men Mr. Emerson claims to have seen 
or heard of, who never ripened, or whose performance in 
actual life was not extraordinary : their superiority is 
admired at starting, the more so as theirs is the tone of 
a youthful giant, who is sent to work revolutions. But, 
having started, "the Colossus shrinks to the common 
size of man.-" Very mortifying is the reluctant ex- 



THE PROMISE BROKEX. 559 

perience, that some unfriendly excess or imbecility 
neutralizes the promise of genius. " We see young men 
who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they 
promise, but they never acquit the debt ; they die young 
and dodge the account ; or if they live, they lose them- 
selves in the crowd." Mr. Browning talks of men who 

" have oft grown old among their books 

To die, case-hardened in their ignorance, 

Whose careless youth had promised what long years 

Of unremitted labour ne'er performed.*' 

Politian is derided for prefixing to many of his epigrams 
the year of his age at which they were composed ; 
thereby, in Scaliger's opinion, very little promoting his 
own reputation, because he fell below the promise 
which his first productions had given, and in the latter 
part of his life seldom equalled the sallies of his youth. 
Johnson moralizes on the frequency with which a youth 
of promise ends in neglect and obscurity; and to the 
atalogue of the inconveniencies of old age, which 
moral and satirical writers have so copiously displayed, 
he would add the all too common loss of fame. In lh\ 
Donaldson's History of Crook Literature we have at 
once a moral, and what New Englanders would call a 
caution, in that Hermogenes, who, after astonishing the 
world with his attainments at seventeen, came to a 
sudden collapse at the age of twenty-five, and spent 

the rest of a long life in hopeless imbecility. There 
was a certain professor at Cambridge, taken note of by 

Sir Walter Scott in his diary, who used to ' tches 

of all the lads ..This college that bade lair U >v distlffl ti<>n 

in life; and these sketches he one day exhibited to a 

shrewd old M.A., who looked over the Collection, ami 

then I, "A promisin : what a pity 

reat part will turn out addle!" And so they do, 

reilects Sir Walter : " Looking round among the young 



56o STARTING WITH LEAPS AND BOUNDS, 

men, one sees to all appearances fine flourish — but it 

ripens not." As in Wordsworth's imagery, — 

"Not seldom, clad in radiant vest, deceitfully goes forth the Morn; 
Not seldom Evening in the west sinks smilingly forsworn." 

Princes in their infancy, childhood, and youth, observes 
Dean Swift, are said to discover prodigious parts and 
wit, to speak things that surprise and astonish : "strange, 
so many hopeful princes, and so many shameful kings ! 
If they happen to die young, they would have been 
prodigies of wisdom and virtue : if they live, they are 
often prodigies indeed, but of another sort." The John 
Robinson of Cakes and Ale is typical as the bright 
particular star of a school, who might go anywhere, 
and do anything, if he liked. " I know that," he would 
answer to admiring friends who told him so ; and 
throughout life he rested content with the barren 
knowledge. The victim of early impressions, capable of 
doing twenty things better than seven-tenths of his 
fellows, he did nothing for that very reason. In literary 
history, and political, we are for ever coming upon 
instances like that of William Cartwright, of Christ 
Church, Oxford, whose fame was so great in the first 
half of the seventeenth century ; who was to be " the 
most florid and seraphical preacher in the University," 
and even " the most noted poet, orator, and philosopher 
of his time." Plays, poems, and sermons of his survive ; 
but none to account for what now seem such hyper- 
bolic praises. Southey had always such misgivings as 
to reputations trumpeted forth in this style, because 
they sometimes upset the bearer, and often indicate 
more dexterity than strength, that when, in 1833, he 
heard of the " great expectations " that were being 
formed of " young Gladstone, the member for Newark, 
who is said to be the ablest person that Oxford has 
sent forth for many years, since Peel or Canning," he 



EXDIXG IX A DULL JOG TROT. 561 

could only hope the young man might not disappoint 
his friends. The result is matter for History. 

It is instructive to read of the Archbishop of Canter- 
bury's son, "young Mr. Potter," in 1747, as promising 
so very greatly in politics that the world, testifies 
Horace Walpole, " is already matching him against 
Mr. Pitt" But Potter and Pitt are no longer bracketed 
as equals ; nor indeed were they beyond Horace's time 
of writing, or thereabouts. Harley l'Estrange and 
Audley Egerton are thus invidiously compared in Lord 
Lytton's story, by an interested observer of the career 
of both : " Who that had seen you both as youths, 
could have thought that Audley was the one to become 
distinguished and eminent — and Harley to degenerate 
into the luxurious idler, averse to all trouble and care- 
less of all fame ? " For this latter hindrance is at least 
as efficient a cause, privative or negative, of deficiency 
and failure in the long run, as what Wordsworth traces 
to haply a temper too severe, or a " nice backwardness 
afraid of shame," that results in "favoured beings" 
failing, as life advances, to approve themselves really 

iter than their fellows, so that the}- merely, like the 

rest, and on a dead level with the rest, 

" live out their time, 

And go to the grave unthought of." 

Better, saith the I 'readier, is the end of a thing than 
the beginning thereof; and the patient in spirit, that 
Works to an end, and to the end, than the proud in 

spirit, impatient almost from the beginning, and star: 
aside like a broken bow. Finis coronal opus, is the 

motto of the patient toiler ; re infecta\ might be that - >f 
the impatient beginner: he begins,— and there an end 

The pregnant phrase of Tacitus in ralba, 

ha.^ become a proverb : Omnium consensu cafax imp, \ 



562 'OMNIUM CONSENSU CAP AX. 

nisi imperdsset. The Earl of Lonsdale's motto, Office 
proves the man, Magistrates indicat virum, is accepted 
as another, but it is virtually, nay verbally, an adapta- 
tion of the sentence attributed to Bias, Solon, and 
others besides, ' Apyj] dvSpa SeUvvrai. Gibbon's verdict 
passed on Maximus is, that whatever abilities that 
emperor might have shown in a subordinate station, 
he was found incapable of administering an empire. 
And of another emperor, later by some eight centuries, 
the same historian reports, " Michael himself, had he 
died in a private station, would have been thought more 
worthy of the empire." If a shrewd, it was also a, 
friendly critic, who remarked of a late distinguished, 
prematurely deceased, and much lamented English 
statesman, that it was, perhaps, better for his fame 
that he served in a secondary office, and that many 
thought him worthy of a still higher rank. Towards 
the middle of the last century, Carteret was marked 
out by the public voice for office, and, like Galba, says 
Earl Stanhope, would ever have been deemed most 
worthy of power if he had not actually attained it. 
Some princes are transformed into beings just short of 
perfection, simply because supreme power must ever be 
beyond their reach ; and such, according to M. Beule, 
was the case with both Drusus and Germanicus, whom 
he consigns to the numerous category of princes who 
promise much before the sceptre has fallen into their 
hands, but whose actions do not correspond to the 
hopes they raised, and who retain the affection of their 
contemporaries only on condition that they are not put 
to the test. M. Beule represents father and son, in his 
historical treatise entitled Le Sang de Germanicus, as 
deriving all their reputation and their popularity from 
the mere fact that, under a bad system of government, 
when tyranny with its worst features is upon the throne, 



IMPERII NISI IMPERASSET: 563 

the multitude are wont, as a Saturday Reviewer puts 
it, to idealize those who stand next to the ruler, and 
yet who can scarcely hope to succeed him. When the 
Archduke Maximilian went to Mexico, it may have 
seemed to him certain that he would make a good, and 
probably a successful, emperor. Before the catastrophe 
came, friendly critics in all quarters were agreed that it 
might be said of him, that he would have been capable 
of being an emperor if he had not been one. 

Don Quixote tells the bachelor Sampson Carrasco, 
u Undoubtedly I have known many that have enjoyed 
considerable reputation for their talents in writing, until, 
by publishing, they have either injured or entirely lost 
their fame." Mr. Savage's Primrose used to maintain 
that for rising in the world there was no better plan 
than to do nothing, provided you have once got a 
general reputation for talent. His notion was, that it 
is better to rest on the character one has, than to 
it to hazard, by continually giving envy 
something to carp at. The men that succeed best, he 
would 'e those who contrive to get a little clique 

about them, who cry them up, not for what they 
actually do, but what they could do if they would 
only take the trouble We read of Mr. Medlicott, that 
throughout his life it was his fortune to be th 
capable of achieving anything, while in fact he 
achieving nothing but that unsolid praise which is so 
d by the simple question, What fa 

done? Ihit it is a true saying, that a man with ever 

mall pretensions to intellectual eminence must be 

worth very little if those who are intimate with him, 
and love him, do not honestly believe that the work 
which he lias actually done is mere child's-; 
pared with that which it is in him to do, if only this Or 

that happy contingency had come to | 



564 EPIMENIDES THE CRETAN: 

Arthur Hugh Clough's was confessedly the familiar 
case of a boy who outshines and surpasses other boys — 
of a young man whose life seems full of promise — and 
then of a grown man in whom the promise seems to 
fade away, and who, if he does anything to reveal his 
powers to the outer world, does far less than his friends 
hoped for. 

Common in every age and clime is the type of social 
favourite portrayed in Wordsworth's Excursion, for 
whom every fancy shaped fair expectations, — 

" But all hopes 
Cherished for him, he suffered to depart, 
Like blighted buds ; or clouds that mimicked land 
Before the sailor's eye ; or diamond drops 
That sparkling decked the morning grass ; or aught 
That was attractive, and hath ceased to be." 



LI. 

ALWAYS LIARS. 
Titus i. 12. 

IF the psalmist went further, in saying that all men 
are liars, than did Epimenides the Cretan, in say- 
ing it of the Cretans only ; on the other hand, what 
the psalmist said was in his haste, whereas the Greek 
said his say in leisure — with deliberate emphasis and 
epigrammatic point. " One of themselves, even a pro- 
phet of their own, said, The Cretans are always liars." 
Commentators remark that although irpo^rjTT]^ may be 
used simply of a poet, yet has it a peculiar propriety 
as applied by St. Paul to Epimenides, who is called 
avrjp Oelos by Plato, and is described by Cicero as fu- 
tura prcesentiens, et vaticinans per furorem ; and again, 
" Concitatione quadam animi, aut soluto liberoque motu, 



HIS INDICTMENT OF THE CRETAXS. 565 

futura praesentiunt, . . . ut Epimenides Cres." Under- 
graduate wit has constructed a familiar tangle of logic 
out of the Cretan's averment, — he being "one of them/' 
and therefore, by self-conviction, not to be believed in 
it. Were the testimony of an alien requisite, to the 
same effect, and indeed in the same words, it is available 
in a verse by Callimachus, who was a Cyrenian. 

St. Paul explicitly accepts and endorses as a true bill, 
this indictment of the Cretans as a race. "This witness 
IS true." And therefore would he have his own son after 
the common faith, Titus, rebuke them sharply, as the 
minister of " God, that cannot lie." Unruly and vain 
talkers, he styles these " always liars," whose mouths 
must be stopped. 

One of the so-called " Crumms fal'n from King 
James's table," and caught up and carried away for us 
by Sir Thomas Overbury, is this : "A lye of error is a 
fault of credulity, not of falsehood, but a presumptuous 
lye is that which a man makes as God made the world, 

of nothing." If a spoken divergence from the truth be 
involuntary, "we lament it as a misfortune," says Mr. 
Carlyle ; but if the divergence be voluntary, there 
superadds itself to our sorrow a just indignation: we 

call the voluntary spoken divergence a lie, and "justly 
abhor it as the essence of human treason and ba 
the desertion of a man to the enemy of men against 
himself and his brethren. . . . Such is every liar with 
the tongue, and .such in all nations [Crete included?] is 
at all ej tnsidered. Men pull his nose, and 

kick him out ofdoors; and by peremptory rive 

methods signify th.it they can and will have no trade 
with him." Justly incensed old Geronte, sire of such a 

son aS I ! 1 nteur (par excellence;, demands, 
"• Est-U vice plus has ? est-il tachc pin-, noire, 

Plus indigne d'un homme €L&ti pour lagloire? 



566 LIES THE OFFSPRING OF COWARDICE. 

Est-il quelque faiblesse, est-il quelque action 

Dont un coeur vraiment noble ait plus d'aversion, 

Puisqu'un seul dementi lui porte une infamie 

Qu'il ne peut effacer s ; il n'expose sa vie, 

Et si dedans le sang il ne lave l'affront 

Qu'un si honteux outrage imprime sur son front ? " 

Cowards tell lies, and those that fear the rod, says 
George Herbert : " Dare to be true. Nothing can need 
a lie : a fault which needs it most, grows two thereby." 
Addison surmises the reason why giving the lie is the 
great violation of the point of honour from man to man, 
an affront that (even if spoken but in jest) nothing but 
blood can expiate, to be this, — that no other vice implies 
a want of courage so much as the making of a lie ; and 
therefore to tell a man he lies, is to touch him in the 
most sensible part of honour, and indirectly to call him 
a coward. The Spectator cannot omit under this head 
what Herodotus tells us of the ancient Persians, that, 
from the age of five years to twenty, they instructed 
their sons in three things only, to ride well, to master the 
bow, and to speak truth. Particularly delighted Lady 
M. W. Montagu professed to be with the punishment in 
Turkey of convicted liars (" triumphant criminals in our 
country, God knows ! ") ; they being burnt in the fore- 
head with a hot iron, when proved to be the authors of 
any notorious falsehood. " How many white foreheads 
should we see disfigured, how many fine gentlemen 
would be forced to wear their wigs as low as their eye- 
brows, were this law in practice with us I " By the laws 
of Alfred the Great, any one who broached a public 
falsehood, and persisted in it, was to have his tongue cut 
out ; and if this penalty had continued in force, every- 
thing relating to the reproduction of human tongues 
would, Robert Southey submits, have been thoroughly 
understood long before this time. The Chinese nowa- 
days have, in some quarters, as bad a name as the 



CONSUMMATE ARTISTS IX LYIXG. s^7 

Cretans of old. We must ever remember, in dealing 
with them, said -Mr. Wingrove Cooke, that the shibboleth 
of Western chivalry — the scorn of a lie as a cowardly 
and dishonouring thing — is to them unknown. He tells 
us how Commissioner Yeh had no hesitation in giving 
British captors and keepers the lie direct, in the 
st way, and could not understand why it was con- 
sidered by our nation as the gravest discourtesy to use 
sucli language. " It was evident that he himself cared 
no more for being discovered in a falsehood than for 
beaten at a game of chess." The Times corre- 
spondent found it psychologically interesting to see a 
great Chinese gentleman shifting and shuffling, and not 
at all conscious that it was disgraceful to abandon 
demonstrated lie propositions which he had just before 
asserted as undoubted truths. Like Moliere's Alceste, — 

u Voyons, voyons un peu par quel biais, dc quel air, 
voulez soutenir un mensonge si clair." 

// ne sait que meutir, is said of Corneille's Dorante, by 

who know him best -And Dorante himself rather 

exults in the accomplishment, and plumes himself on 

his exceptional qualifications for it, and his consummate 

culture of it. Practice makes perfect, and he goes in for 

tion. Rare endowments of nature are indispens- 
able, as well as sedulous observance of ai 

e del fait 
II y i.uit promptil 
Ne be brouiller jam 

I man who has never been within the does 

'.now what a thunderstorm ' I man 

who ha. new has but a fain: 

of a i SO, said Maeaulay, he who ha 

1 Memoirs ma; I not to know what i; 

lie. Am an ,;>• writer in the Dublin i . the other 



568 SWIFT ON LYING. 

day, accused the author of the Letters of Quirinus of 
beating Barere all to bits, in wilful and deliberate 
mendacity. Anger will make a hot partisan go great 
lengths in ultramontanist objurgation ; and there are 
partisans of the Veuillot type who seem to cherish the 
breadth and strength and flavour of Swift, whose Lord 
Peter, in the Tale of a Tub, had such " an abominable 
habit of telling huge palpable lies upon all occasions ; 
and not only swearing to the truth, but cursing the 
whole company to hell if they pretended to make the 
least scruple of believing him. . . . And that which 
was the good of it, he would swear desperately all the 
while that he never told a lie in his life." Dean Swift 
appears to have had a pronounced liking for the exposi- 
tion of lying and the exposure of liars, — witness various 
sections of his curiously miscellaneous writings. To say 
nothing of the ironical treatise on The Art of Political 
Lying, in the composition of which Arbuthnot had 
probably a main share, his Scheme for a Hospital for 
Incurables calculates on an infinity of incurable liars in 
all parts of the kingdom : making allowance for citizens' 
wives, mercers, 'prentices, newswriters, toadies and flat- 
terers, he cannot possibly admit a lower number than 
thirty thousand. One of his reflections on various sub- 
jects is, that universal as the practice of lying is, and as 
easy a one as it seems, he does not remember to have 
heard three good lies in all his conversation, even from 
those who were most celebrated in that faculty. But then 
the Dean was rather exacting. More so than his Most 
Reverend friend and correspondent Archbishop King, 
who, in one of the epistles signed " William Dublin," 
thinks he can partly guess " who writ the letter " Swift 
has mentioned : " it must be one of two or three whose 
business it is to invent a lie and throw dirt. . . . They 
have published and dispersed several libellous prints 



MEASURELESS IJARS. 569 

against mc, in one of which I marked forty-three down- 
right falsehoods in matters of fact. In another, it is 
true, there was only one such ; the whole and every part 
of it, from beginning to end, being pure invention and 
falsehood.'" When Fag details to Captain Absolute his 
fertile mendacities on his master's account, and the 
latter desires him to keep within bounds, and never say 
more than is necessary, " I beg pardon, sir," says the 
valet, " I beg pardon, — but, with submission, a lie is 
nothing unless one supports it. Sir, whenever I draw 
on my invention for a good current lie, I always forge 
indorsements as well as the bill." His master can only 
bid him take care he don't hurt his credit, by offering 
too much security. It is one of Ben Jonson's Discoveries, 
that " to triumph in a lie, and a lie one's-self has forged, 
is frontlcss. Folly often goes beyond her bounds ; but 
Impudence knows none." Elia's first experience of the 
old Margate hoy made him acquainted with a Spanish- 
complex ioned young fellow-passenger, remarkably hand- 
some, with an officer-like assurance, and an irrepressible 
volubility of assertion, who was, in fact, the greatest liar 
Elia had ever met with then, or since: he was none of 

your hesitating, half story-tellers who go on sounding 
your belief, and only giving you as much as they see 
you can swallow at a time — the nibbling pick-pockets of 
your patience— but one who committed downright, day- 
light depredations upon his neighbour's "bank of faith." 
Him Elia describes as nol one to stand shivering upon 
the brink, but ;i hearty, thorough-paced liar, who plunj 
at oner into the depths of your credulity. R 1, — 

himself a self-convicted liar of no mean dimensions — 
was, by his own account, shocked into a hasty reti 
from the Cafe du Grand-Commun, by the cool lying of 
a good-looking officer who professed to have been 
present at yesterday's representation of Le Devin <iu 



570 LIES INVENTIVE AND CIRCUMSTANTIAL. 

Village, every particular of which he invented for the 
occasion, as the fancy struck him. The description was 
a protracted one, and it was given with equal assurance 
and simplicity, and the narrator was no young fop, 
fat, or fribble, but a well-mannered, middle-aged officer, 
with the cross of St. Louis to show on his breast ; but 
there was not a word of truth in his description from 
first to last. " II m'etait tres-clair que celui qui parlait 
si savamment de cette repetition n'y avait point ete, 
puisqu'il avait devant les yeux, sans le connaitre, cet 
auteur qu'il disait avoir tant vu," — that is to say, Jean- 
Jacques himself. 

Titus Oates is treated by Macaulay as the founder of 
a school : his success proved that no romance is too wild 
to be received with faith by understandings which fear 
and hatred have disordered : his slanders were mon- 
strous ; but they were well timed : he spoke to a people 
made credulous by their passions ; and thus, by impu- 
dent and cruel lying, he raised himself in a week from 
begging and obscurity to luxury, renown, and power. 
If wholly different in kind, not perhaps very different 
in degree, of talent for lying, was that Thomas Lord 
Wharton who figures in the same historian's pages, and 
whose mendacity and effrontery passed into proverbs. 
"Of all the liars of his time he was the most deliberate, 
the most inventive, and the most circumstantial." He 
might, for all his breeding, have been claimed for first 
cousin by the Labassecouriennes painted from the life in 
Villette ; who, whenever a lie was or seemed expedient, 
brought it out with a careless ease and breadth altoge- 
ther untroubled by the rebuke of conscience ; not a soul 
of them but was above being ashamed of a lie; they 
thought nothing of it : to invent might not be precisely 
a virtue, but it was the most venial of faults. 

The late Sara (Mrs. Henry Nelson) Coleridge de- 



LIES OF LOQUACIOUS VANITY, 



clan... to be its 

,ard of truth — " that lubricity, in consequer. 
which one Irishman will not trust another." For truth 
belongs to tl. of the mind ; and if in 

that deep flooring there is not evenness and unit 
above rm - be unstable, irregular, and insecure. 

■ As untruth is the great corrupter of moral conduct, so 
must it be of national welfare." But she freely cor. 
that as the Irishman is not specially malignant or 

.. his special faJ anot be Satanic And it 

seems true enough to be a truism, that departure from 
truth, where no dark passions or in! 
to be gratified, usually arises from quickness o( 
and feeling, uncontrolled by principle. To van:. 
the foundation of the most ridiculous and contemptible 
.m Smith traces the generation of " the foolish 
liar, who endeavours to excite the admiration of the 
company by the relation i .ures which never had 

he enumerates among " follies," 
which, ach us how common they 

ne should h >ark of coir, 

us from. J thus charactej 

f his and BoswelTs old acquaintance: " 

good man, Sir, but he and a liar. He, 

however, only tells li of vie: 

ice, in c Like- 

have cut down Hotspur ; and 
sticking to it when confronted with the veritable cham- 
pion, and lamenting, " how this world is giv 
lying \" — much as he had 1 

about the men In buckram ; and well 
qualified he was to a; cities 

of his old friend Shallow, about which he could m< 
in soliloquy, — " how subject we old n. i this vice 

of ly; justice hath done Dot 



572 INDUSTRIOUS, UNSCRUPULOUS, 

but prate to me of the wildness of his youth . . . and 
every third word a lie." Johnson discusses with Boswell 
on some other occasion the highly fabulous narratives 
of a common friend, of whom Lord Mansfield had sug- 
gested, " Suppose we believe one-half of what he tells." 
Ay, said the Doctor, " but we don't know which half to 
believe. By his lying we lose not only our reverence for 
him, but all comfort in his conversation." Chateau- 
briand was only not less amused than amazed by the 
"inconceivable falsehoods of the future Bishop of 
Morocco," that Abbe Guillon, who, taking advantage of 
a similarity of name, pretended that he had given abso- 
lution to the Princesse de Lamballe, at La Force, after 
having had an almost miraculous escape from the 
massacre of the Carmes; and who boasted also that 
he was the author of Robespierre's discourse to the 
Supreme Being. " I laid a bet one day that I could 
make him say he had been in Russia ; he did not go 
quite so far as that, but he modestly owned that he 
had passed some months at St. Petersburg." 

Alison is aghast at the first Napoleon's entire disregard 
of truth, and the " unblushing, or perhaps it should be 
said unconscious, effrontery " with which he continued 
the most mendacious statements, after their falsehood 
had been demonstrated, not merely to others, but to 
himself. An able reviewer of Lanfrey's book recently 
described Napoleon as one of the most unscrupulous and 
industrious liars that ever lived — a man utterly destitute 
of any sense whatever of truthfulness, who lied from 
morning to night, told lies to everybody he met, even 
to the smallest people, and about everything he had to 
do with, even the most petty and trivial things. Some 
persons, the reviewer observed, are restrained from 
telling lies by the reflection that the people to whom 
they are told must know the statements to be false ; but 



AND INCORRIGIBLE LfARS. 573 

Napoleon was far above this weakness. " lie would 
gravely declare that he had never uttered certain words 
or signed a particular document before people who were 
quite aware that he knew they had heard him use the 
words or seen him sign the paper. " His private corre- 
spondence, published in our own day, is shown to con- 
stantly contradict his official statements, and to be full 
of falsehoods. And his last days at St. Helena are 
known to have been spent in weaving a bewildering web 
of fable and misrepresentation; which "mass of lies" 
highly imaginative historians have garnished with little 
fancies and inventions of their own ; so that M. Lanfrey, 
in setting about his History of the Emperor, had to 
destroy first, in order to construct. 

There figures in the correspondence of Madame de 
Sevigne a certain Mademoiselle de Plessis, and the figure 
she makes is that of an incorrigible and irrepressible 
teller of fibs. Madame one day reproved her for the 
excesses of her daring in this sort, and Ma'm'sellc 
owned herself] with downcast eyes, the greatest liar in 

the world. Yet, a week later, having to describe a 
family wedding-dinner, this demoiselle said that the 
first course for one day, included twelve hundred 
dishes. " We all sat petrified," says .Madame tie 
SeVigne'. "At length I took courage and said, 'Con- 
sider a little, Mademoiselle, yOU must mean twelve, 

not twelve hundred. One sometimes ha- slips of the 

tongue.' ' Oh, no, Madamel it was twelve hundred, or 

eleven hundred, I am quite sure; I cannot say which, 

for fear of telling a falsehood, but one or the othi I I 

know it was;'" and she repeated it to the guests a 

of times, and would not bate them a thicken. 
Quite a little \> ,ical stud)' is that p 

the boyish career of Pip, in Great Expectations, when 
he invents the wildest stories about Miss Eiavishai 



574 AUDACITIES OF INVENTIVE LYING. 

domestic arrangements, going on from extravagance to 
impossibility, and from the incredible to almost the 
inconceivable, just to astound his perplexed examiners, 
and for the love of the thing, and to assert his superiority 
to those about him. Miss Havisham he saw sitting in 
her room in a black velvet coach, he tells them, with a 
Defoe-like simplicity of narrative and circumstantiality 
of detail, and Miss Estella handed her in cake and wine 
at the coach- window, on a gold plate ; " and we all had 
cake and wine on gold plates. And I got up behind 
the coach to eat mine because she told me to." — " Was 
anybody else there ? " asked Mr. Pumblechook. — " Four 
dogs," said Pip. — " Large or small ?" — " Immense. And 
they fought for veal cutlets out of a silver basket," etc., 
etc. The narrator bade fair at this stage of his career 
to become a Munchausen in mendacity, a Cretan of the 
purest breed and biggest size. Honest Joe the black- 
smith helped effectively to check this potentiality of 
mischief. " Lookee here, Pip, at what is said to you by 
a true friend," as regards those bouncers. " Which this 
to you the true friend say. If you can't get to be oncom- 
mon through going straight, you'll never do it through 
going crooked. So don't tell no more on 'em, Pip, and 
live well and die happy. . . . But bearing in mind 
that them which I meantersay of a stunning and out- 
dacious sort — alluding to them which bordered on weal- 
cutlets and dog-fighting — a sincere well-wisher would 
adwise, Pip, their being dropped into your meditations 
when you go upstairs to bed. That's all, old chap, and 
don't never do it no more/' Little Leonard, in Mrs. 
Gaskell's Ruth, perplexed his grave and reverend seniors 
by showing a strange odd disregard of truth ; he in- 
vented stories, and told them with so grave a face, that 
unless there was some internal evidence of their incor- 
rectness (such as describing a cow with a bonnet on), he 



SHEER FABRICATION. 575 

was generally believed, and his statements, which were 
given with the full appearance of relating a real occur- 
rence, had once or twice led to awkward results. The 
small boy was thus early qualified, one might infer, to be 
admitted into the Lawnmarket Club, celebrated in tra- 
ditions of Edinburgh, the members of which used, when 
there was no post from London, to invent imaginary 
news, and circulate it with all pains in the absence of 
real ; whence came the title of Lawnmarket Gazettes, 
to designate articles of intelligence which had no found- 
ation in fact. Newspaper canards are a long-estab- 
lished institution. But sometimes the reporter's inven- 
tion is exercised in ways least to be suspected. Sir 
Samuel Romilly, in 1817, took note, in his Diary, of the 
perpetual and extraordinary misrepresentations in the 
journals, of the proceedings in Chancery, — the Morning 
Chronicle, for instance, reporting Sir Samuel and others 
as extravagantly praising the Chancellor, and the 
Chancellor himself as expressing his painful anxiety to 
master each case, etc., — pure fictions altogether, it 

ms ; for, not only the expressions contained in the 
ncv. were never used, but nothing passed which 

afforded a pretext for pretending that the\' had been 

<\. "The substance as well as the language, the 

panegyrics, and the apology, are all pure invention." 

trly thirty years earlier, Romilly had been struck 
by Mirabeau's cool fabrication, in the columns of the 
Courtier de Provence, of a speech he alleged t<» have 

:i just delivered by Mounier in the National 
bly, and «»f a happy retort then and there made by the 

Will 11 tin's not a single word was uttered in 

tlu bly/ 1 Wither Mounier nor any oth< i 

my such speech ; neither Mirabeau nor any 

other person made any such reply. A year or two 

viously, Mirabeau ha Mill)- a minutely 



576 IXVETERATE LIARS. 

detailed account of a dispute which he supposed himself 
to have had with Gibbon, the historian, at Lord Lans- 
downe's table, and in which he expressed himself with 
so much violence, that he now felt he was to blame. 
Xow, Mirabeau " certainly never had any such dispute 
with Gibbon f and at the time spoken of, Gibbon was 
actually residing at Lausanne. Evidently it was not 
with Mirabeau, as with Mademoiselle de Scudery, a 
canon of faith and practice, that "il n'est jamais permis 
a un homme sage d'inventer des choses qu'on ne 
puisse croire. Le veritable art du mensonge est de bien 
ressembler a la veriteV' Folks, according to Mat Prior, 
prone to leasing, 

" Say things at first because they're pleasing, 
Then prove what they have once asserted, 
Nor care to have their lie deserted, 
Till their own dreams at length deceive them, 
And, oft repeating, they believe them." 

Lying may be fostered into a passion, a ruling pas- 
sion ; and it is a ruling passion that has even been 
known, like others, to be strong in death. Hazlitt has a 
story of a man so notorious for a propensity to lying 
(not out of spite or cunning, but as a gratuitous exercise 
of invention), that from a child no one could ever 
believe a syllable he uttered ; and the last act of his 
life did not disgrace his renown. For having gone 
abroad, and falling into a dangerous decline, he was 
advised to return home ; and so, after paying all that he 
was worth for his passage, he went on shipboard, and 
employed the few remaining days he had to live in 
making and executing his will ; in which he bequeathed 
large estates in different parts of England, money in the 
funds, rich jewels, rings, and all kinds of valuables, to 
his old friends and acquaintance, who, not knowing how 
far the force of nature could go, were not for some time 



E J VL COMMUNICA TIONS. 577 

convinced that all this fairy wealth had never an exist- 
ence anywhere but in the idle coinage of his brain 
whose whims and projects were no more. The extreme 
keeping in this character Hazlitt can only account for 
by supposing such an original constitutional levity as 
made truth entirely indifferent to the man, and the 
serious importance attached to it by others an object of 
perpetual sport and ridicule. 



-0 — 



LII. 

EVIL COMMUMCATIONS. 
1 Corinthians xv. 33. 

BY some to Menander, by others to Euripides, is 
referred the metrical quotation which St. Paul 
apparently uses as proverbial : 

<bdtlpOV<Tll> TJ0T) Xf)T](TTll OfXlXiClL KClKdl. 

The same apostle who warns the Corinthians that 
corrupt communications have notoriously, proverbially, 

a corrupting influence upon sound morals, exhorts the 
Ephesians to let no corrupt communication (X£yo? 
a-enrpos) proceed out of their mouth. Corruption i^ o>n- 

tagious. To communicate is to impart. The commu- 
nicant cannot loi tin incorrupt The plague soon 

spreads, and the p! >n telk I law felli 

ship with the lame, and you will learn t<> limp, 
Latin adage : Claudicant rsatione utens, ipseqik 

dan It is a cat. hing complaint : Menander 

is fathered with the saw, icaicok 6/ukuv, &' ai ;o-tj 

KriKns, which i^ all but identical with St. Paul's quol 
tion, in spirit, though not in words. A late with tin- 
wicked, it « I you will become wicl: elf. 

I' 1' 



57% EVIL COMMUNICATIONS 

Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not 
be burned ? Can one go upon hot coals, and his feet 
not be burned ? Both these are " burning questions " 
put by the Wise King. 

Sir Thomas Browne, in his Christian Morals, address- 
ing himself, after the manner of Marcus Antoninus in 
his Meditations, is special in the enjoinder, " Be critical 
in thy consortion. . . . Look not for roses in 
Attalus's garden [of poisons], or wholesome flowers in 
a venomous plantation. And since there is scarce any 
one bad, but some others are the worse for him, tempt 
not contagion by proximity, and hazard not thyself in 
the shadow of corruption." Certainly, says another of 
our old writers, if there be any Dalilah under heaven, 
it is to be found in bad society ; for that will bind us, 
blind us, betray us, undo us. " When the Achates of 
thy life shall be ill, will not thy life be so too ? " One 
rotten apple will infect the store ; the putrid grape 
corrupts the whole cluster. " Nous voyons le vice, et le 
vice germe au fond de notre coeur." " Peu a peu, a votre 
insu, vous etes transformes a son image, et sa corruption 
s'est infiltree dans vos ames." Know, says Epictetus in 
his Enchiridion, that if your companion be dissolute, his 
corruption will also reach you at length, although your 
mind was altogether pure and honest before. Leigh 
Hunt's Sir Ralph Esher has to utter a lament over an 
instance of the kind : " Yes : so dangerous is an ill com- 
panion to the best and cleverest persons, during youth, 
that what I had hardly dared to think of as a remote 
possibility, had turned out to be too true :" the mischief 
was done. 

Alcrxpois yap alcrxpa "Kpayp-ar €K$i8dcrKeTai, 

as Electra has it in Sophocles. Men love not to be 
found singular, observes Robert South, — especially where 
the' singularity lies in the rugged and severe paths of 



CORRUPT GOOD MANNERS. 579 

virtue : company causes confidence, and gives both credit 
and defence, credit to the crime, and defence to the 
criminal. Just as the fcarfullest and the basest crea- 
tures, got into flocks and herds, become bold and daring, 
so "the modestest natures, hardened by the fellowship 
and concurrence of others in the same vicious course, 
grow into another frame of spirit ; and in a short time 
lose all apprehension of the indecency and foulness of 
that which they have so familiarly and so long com 
with." To yield to the influence of the things and people 
around you, is to drift with the moral current. The 
first day, as Colani traces such a decline and fall, you 
shudder with horror. The second, you are impressed 
by the force of numbers on the opposite side, and begin 
to be half-ashamed of your isolation. The third, you 
incline to charge yourself with prejudices and prudery. 
In brief, by the end of a month, or the end of six months 
perhaps, descending by insensible degrees this smooth 
decline, you come to be of one mind with "good 
society," and have lost the courage to break with it. 
" En vertu de la loi de la solidarity on est implique* dans 
la corruption commune." Every man, says Feltham, 
will naturally endeavour to communicate to others that 
quality which may be predominant in himself: " v. 
converse with nothing but will work upon US, and by 
the unperceived stealth of time, liken US to itself." 
Hence the stress the old moralist lays upon the choice 
of the company we keep, as one of the most w. 

actions of our lives. " Do you see," said Dr. Arnold to 

r who had recently come to Rugby, 

" those two boys walking together? 1 never saw them 

together before ; you should make an especial point of 

observing the company they keep ; -nothin lis the 

changes in a boy's character." It is an apophtl 

leau'Sj " Rien ne montre mieux les vrais penchants 



SSo 'NOSCITUR EX SOCIIS: 

d'un homme que Fespece de ses attachements.'" Most 
men, it has been said, are not only known by the com- 
pany they keep, but become part of that company — 
much as Ulysses is made to call himself part of all that 
he has seen. Antisthenes the Cynic, and reputed founder 
of the Cynic school, was perhaps more witty than wise 
in his answer to reproaches for keeping bad company : 
" Physicians are with their patients, and yet they don't 
take the fever.-" Sometimes they do ; and sometimes, 
even when they do not, other patients are supposed to 
take it through them. Magni refert quibuscum vixeris. 
Homer's goat-herd, Melanthius, sententiously asserts 

that 

" Heaven with a secret principle endued 
Mankind, to seek their own similitude," — 

and similia similibus corrumpzmtur, as well as curantur. 
" On vous juge d'abord par ceux que vous voyez," says 
Cresset's Ariste. Chesterfield bids his son depend upon 
it, he will sink or rise to the level of the company which 
he commonly keeps : " People will judge of you, and 
not unreasonably, by that.'" He applauds accordingly 
the good sense of the Spanish saw, " Tell me whom you 
live with, and I will tell you who you are." Noscihir 
ex sociis. Pie that lies down with dogs shall rise up with 
fleas, is another saw of Spanish parentage. The old 
Hebrew one, "Two dry sticks will set on fire one green," 
is cited by Dr. Trench when discoursing on the fruits of 
evil companionship. His predecessor in the archiepis- 
copal see of Dublin somewhere affirms that bad ex- 
amples do much the greatest amount of evil among 
those who do not follow them : for one who is corrupted 
by becoming as bad as a bad example, there are ten, 
by Dr. Whately's reckoning, that are debased by be- 
coming content with being better. 

Of Robert Penfold, in Foul Play, we read, that after 



CORRUPTIXG ASSOCIATIONS. 581 

herding as a convict, unjustly convicted, with the great- 
est miscreants in creation, he sailed for a penal colony, 
a creature embittered, poisoned : they had not reduced 
him to their level, but they had injured his mind. Very 
exceptional is the privilege of the woman who says, in 
Miss Bail lie's Glasgow tragedy. — 

u We, by God's grace, may sit by Satan's side,— 
Ay, on the selfsame settle, yet the while 
lie ne'er one whit the worse." 

So in another degree, and kind, is that of certain cha- 
racters described by the author of Oldtown Folks as 
fashioning themselves in a manner the least to be ex- 
pected from the circumstances and associates which sur- 
round them. "As a fair white lily grows up out of the 
bed of meadow muck, and, without note or comment, 
rejects all in the soil that is alien from her being, and 
goes on fashioning her own silver cup side by side with 
weeds that are drawing coarser nutriment from the soil/' 
it is said, we sometimes observe a refined and gentle 
nature by some singular internal force unfolding il 
by its own laws, and confirming itself in its own bell 
as wholly different from all that surrounds it as is the 
lily from the rag-weed. The rule holds none the ' 

-unded I y : " It 

in that either v. 

aught, as men t , one of another: tl 

, let men t.V. of their company." Tl, 

ompanions b ■ \\w 

jester had need be witty and humorous . to 

make one tolerant to the corrupting infl f such a 

man tricken in yi 

1th the fat kni her 

theme — "<»ne that is well-nigh worn to ] 
to show himself a young gallant !"' 

ken in hand by him to some pur- 



582 VETERANS IN VICE. 

pose ; and Sir John congratulates himself with a chuck- 
ling, " Go thy ways, old Jack " — " I'll make more of thy 
old body than I have done." Prince Hal tells himself, 
histrionically, but all too truly, " There is a devil haunts 
thee, in the likeness of a fat old man : a tun of man is 
thy companion. Why dost thou converse with that 
trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that 
swollen parcel of dropsies, . . . that reverend vice, 
that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in 
years, . . . that villanous abominable misleader of 
youth, FalstafT, that old white-bearded Satan ? " Even 
the sexagenarian, or septuagenarian repentance of such 
a hoary head, never yet found in the way of righteous- 
ness, is something of a sad sight, if so we may interpret 
Seneca's query, Quid est turpius quam senex vivere inci- 
piens ? just beginning to live to virtue when it is time 
to die, Better late than never ; and on that account the 
aged sensualist is fitly admonished by Horace, Tempus 
abire iibi est : ne . - . . Rideat, et pulset lasciva decen- 
iius cetas. Cato said to an old debauchee, that age has 
deformities enough of its own, why add to them the 
deformity of vice ? It is only in the Vision of Sin a 
grey and gap-toothed man as lean as death prompts a 
coeval to chaunt him now some wicked stave till the 
glow-worm of the grave glimmer in those rheumy eyes. 
" Fear not thou to loose thy tongue ; 

Set thy hoary fancies free ; 
What is loathsome to the young 

Savours well to thee and me." 

The most-disgusting of all made-up old reprobates is 
held to be he who, padded, rouged, and dyed, mingles in 
a circle of fast young men, and disgusts even them by 
the foul pruriency of his talk. 

" Certes, the saddest sight by Angel seen 
Is the tired breast of some old debauchee, 
Who, worn yet wicked, gloats on what has been." 



SUPER. 1 NNVA TED SIXXERS. 5 S3 

Dr. South treats it as "generally the property of 
an old sinner" to find a greater satisfaction in behold- 
ing him who is to succeed him in his vice, than him 
who is to succeed in his estate. It is in part, on the 
preacher's showing, the imbecility of age that " makes it 
the proper season for a superannuated sinner to enjoy 
the delights of sin in the rebound ; and to supply the 
impotence of practice by the airy, fantastic pleasure of 
memory and reflection " — to refresh his decrepid effete 

isuality with the transcript and history of his former 
life. Ben Jon.^on gives expression to an indignant 
>te what we fathers do !" in the way of bad example 
and discourse to sons, only too ready to follow in it : 

u Nay, when our own 

Portion is fled, to prey on their remainder, 

We call them into fellowship of vice, 

And teach them all bad ways to buy affliction. n 

Marmontcl denounces "Fair et le ton leger dont les 
ix libertins savent tourner en badinage les scrupules 

de la vertu." One must be a father, he said, to form a 

healthy judgment on ces vices contagieux qui attaquent les 
trs dans leur source. Applicable in an applied sense 

are Southey's lines on the "cursed iritero by which 

ntaglOUS power <>f mischief" was coin eyed, and the 

infected communicant tai 

' unliable I 1 
N there a child whose little lovely ways 

Might win all hearts on whom his parents 
Till thej 

Oh, hide him from th. I '. withering Sight," 

and shut him out from hearing that old reprobate's still 

more withering words. To hi-, account of the systematic 

debasement, by precocious debauchery, of tin- naturally 

brave and generous mind of young Henry IV. , by Anno 

and hi. coadjutors, Sir James Stephen appends the 

remark, that whereas Anno has been canonized by the 



584 THE VICIOUSNESS OF OLD MEN 

See of Rome, and Henry excommunicated, impartial 
history will reverse either sentence, and will pronounce 
her anathemas rather on St. Anno, by whom the princely 
boy was exposed to the furnace of temptation, than on 
him in whose young mind the seeds of vice, so unspar- 
ingly sown, sprang up with such deadly luxuriance. 
One of the least admiring of Chesterfield's biographers 
speaks of him as " awful in his smiling experience, his 
horrible suggestions. Of all depravity in the world there 
can be none so great as that of the father who would 
corrupt his boy.-" Mr. Trollope paints a quasi-Chester- 
field in the person of his Sir Lionel Bertram, who did 
his best to banish any such feeling on the part of his 
son as that of restraint in free talk, which may mean 
loose talk ; and the reflection ensues : " There is always 
some compliment implied when an old man unbends be- 
fore a young one, and it is this which makes the vicious- 
ness of old men so dangerous/' Mr. John Forster in his 
Life of Dickens has a curious story of " a distinguished 
writer," their common friend, and " a man of many ster- 
ling fine qualities, but with a habit of occasional free 
indulgence in coarseness of speech," who once met at 
dinner at Lausanne " a stately English baronet " and his 
" two milksop sons" who were being educated into man- 
hood with exceptional purity and innocence ; at which 
crisis of their career, " our ogre friend " encountered 
these lambs, and, " as if possessed by a devil, launched 
out into such frightful and appalling impropriety — rang- 
ing over every kind of forbidden topic and every species 
of forbidden word and every sort of scandalous anec- 
dote — that years of education in Newgate," affirms the 
author of Oliver Twist, "would have been as nothing 
compared with their experience of that one afternoon. 
After turning paler and paler, and more and more 
stony, the baronet, with a half-suppressed cry, rose and 



A SPECIAL PERIL TO THE YOUNG. 

fled." The best, meaning really the worst, of the story- 
is, that the sons, intent on the ogre, remained behind 
instead of following their father, and are supposed to 
have been ruined from that hour. 

The jovial guardsman, Le Balafre, in Quentin Ditr- 
ward, is rebuked by his commander, the brave old Lord 
Crawford, for unseemly jesting when his nephew is by : 
" Hush ! Ludovic, hush ! thou beast, man ! — If thou dost 
not respect my grey hairs, because I have been too much 
of a routier myself, respect the boy's youth and inno- 
cence, and let us have no more of such unbecoming 
daffing." So again the minstrel desires the archer in 
Castle Dangerous to "forbear light talk while my son is 
in your company — a boy of innocent life, and timid in 
conversation.-" Bertram opines that whoso would wish 
to have his own hair honoured when time has strewed 
it with silver, should so rein his mirth when in the 
[ice of youth, as may show in what respect he- 
holds innocence. Acton Bell's much-enduring mistress 
ofWildfell Hall avows her greatest source of uneasiness, 
amid accumulated trials, to have been her litt! 
whom his father and his father's friends delighted to 
encourage in all the embryo vices a child can show, and 
I met in all the evil habits he could acquire — in a 
' make a man of him " v. f their 

amusements. The s\ Tuption in Mich a case 

might be found to differ rather in than in kind 

from Simon's treatment of th , Dauphin: "The 

lit)- and brutality of Simon depraved at once the 
body and soul of his pupil/' Lamartirj We read 

in the criminal trials of the (ih< nhrs in the fifteenth 
century, that a distill citizen Was banished for 

having offended the ears of a child by unseemly talk: 

Washington Irving tells US, in his account <>f 

Abbey, how Joe Murray's ribal and jots v 



586 'MAXIMA DEBETUR 

scandal to the housekeeper, Nanny Smith, who, however, 
being above harm herself, endured them in silence ; till 
at last, on his singing and uttering them before a young 
girl, she could contain herself no longer, but read him a 
lecture that made his ears ring. The " preceptor i} and 
afterwards friend for life of Robert Burns, Mr. Murdoch, 
professed to have never seen the poet angry but twice— 
the more noteworthy of the two occasions being " with 
an old man, for using smutty innuendoes and double en- 
tendres. Were every foul-mouthed old man to receive a 
seasonable check in this way, it would be to the advantage 
of the rising generation." Guy Patin, on hearing of the 
death of the debauched Des Barreaux, stigmatized him 
with honest warmth as one who had bien infecte ' de pauvres 
felines gens de son libertinage, and whose conversation 
was bien danger ease et fort pestilente. Colonel Newcome 
wins every heart that is worth the winning, by the indig- 
nant fervour of his reproach of Captain Costigan, when 
singing what he called one of his prime songs, in young 
Clive's hearing : the Colonel's high voice trembles with 
anger as he denounces " such disgusting ribaldry," and 
demands of the smutty old sot, " Do you dare, sir, to 
call yourself a gentleman, and to say that you hold the 
king's commission, and to sit down amongst Christians 
and men of honour, and defile the ears of young boys 
with this wicked balderdash ? . . For shame, you 
old wretch ! Go home to your bed, you hoary old sin- 
ner ! And for my part, I 'm not sorry that my son 
should see, for once in his life, to what shame and 
degradation and dishonour drunkenness and whisky 
may bring a man." The outraged sire would have ap- 
plauded to the echo Churchill's opening lines to one 
of his satires : — 

" The time hath been, a boyish, blushing time, 
When modesty was scarcely held a crime ; 



pueris reverentia: 5S7 

When the most wicked had some touch of grace, 
And trembled to meet Virtue face to face ; 
When those who, in the cause of Sin grown grey, 
Had served her without grudging day by day, 
Were yet so weak an awkward shame to feel, 
And strove that glorious service to conceal. " 

Let nothing unfit to be said or seen, pleads Juvenal, 
enter those thresholds where youth resides : 

' ; Nil dictu feedum, visuque hajc limina tangat, 
Intra quae puer est." 

It was the elder Cato's proud care not to utter an 
unseemly word before his son, any more than he would 
in the presence of the vestal virgins. Even Mistr 

•ees that 'tis not good that children should 

know any wickedness ; nor can she refrain from rating 

Parson Evans for teaching little William Page such 

words from the Latin grammar as, to her mistaking 

. are of questionable propriety. " Les enfants sont 

bien penetrants!" said Grimm, who had only too good 

in, that bad reason, for being circumspect 

in their presence : " ils ont I'air de jouer, [Is ont entendu, 

ils ont vu." It has influence upon a child, 

ther for good or for evil, urges the Caxton essayist, 

to mix early and habitually with those grown up 

good to the mere intellect always— the evil depends 

•\ the character and discretion of those the child 

ns. His construction of the Maxima debetut 

maxim is, We must revere the candour and inexperience 
and in:: f their mind-. lb tell US of !"' young 

ival St John, in whose frank charming manner "the 
in bloom of innocence wa yet vi pirited and 

manly a.- he was in all really manly points, that often 

out of respect for his del n of 

>pped short in hi^ narrative, or lost the 

point of his anecdote. So with the '' ' 

Lord Lytfo n, — 



588 'MAXIMA DEBETUR PUERIS REVERENTIA? 

" Him that I taught to ride, to fence, to swim, 
And never yet could teach an evil thing, 
Rebuked . . . by that girl's face of his," 

the Duke of Bracciano testifies. When Harry Warring- 
ton came abruptly upon the company at dinner at 
the White Horse Ordinary, — including the jolly good- 
looking countenance of Parson Sampson, who was un- 
clerically keeping the table in a roar, — " it may have 
been modesty, or it may have been claret, which caused 
his reverence's rosy face to redden deeper, but when he 
saw Mr. Warrington enter, he whispered Maxima debetur 
to the laughing country squire who sat next him," but 
who anon stolidly called out to the parson to continue 
his story, and got a heavy tread on his gouty toe in con- 
sequence. In a later chapter the remorseful chaplain 
resolves not to offend innocent young gentlemen by his 
cynicism. He owns himself wrong, and promises amend- 
ment, for which there is so much room. " I have got a 
little sister, who is at boarding-school, and, as I keep a 
decent tongue in my head when I am talking with my 
little Patty, and expect others to do as much, sure I may 
try and do as much by you/' M. Agricola in Le Jirif 
Errant asks, Is there not in the presence of childhood 
a something pure, almost sacred, which has its influence 
on our words and actions, and imposes a salutary re- 
serve ? " The coarsest man will respect the presence of 
children." W T e read of Vernon, in Lucretia, when, gradu- 
ally more and more wedded to home, he dropped his old 
companions, and " felt a noble shame for the excesses 
into which they had led him," that he now set grave 
guard on his talk, lest any of the ancient levity should 
taint the ears of his children. The reflection follows, 
that nothing is more common to parents than the desire 
that their children should escape their faults ; and that 
we scarcely know ourselves till we have children, and 



CONTAMINATED BY HOARY VICE. 5S9 

then, if we love them duly, we look narrowly into fail- 
ings that become vices, when they serve as examples 
to the young. 

Leigh Hunt had some reason for honest pride in 
ascribing mainly to his strictures in the press the dis- 
solution of a so-called " academic theatre " in London, 
the proprietors of which, some of whom were fathers 
of the children, instructed the infant performers in the 
most iniquitous plays of our degraded wits. Frederic 
Soulie was at least indignant against " des etres qui 
auraient passe de longues annees de leur vie a corrom- 
pre Fame, le corps, Tesprit d'un enfant ignorant." The 
canker, as Laertes has it, 

" galls the infants of the spring, 

Too oft before their buttons be disclosed ; 
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth 
Contagious blastments are most imminent." 

A clerical essayist on Growing Old draws upon his 
long-ago remembrances for a hideous picture of an old 
man of the world telling an indecent story with a gloat- 
ing relish — and instilling cynical notions of life into the 
minds of young lads — and even using phrases of double 

ming in the presence of innocent young women, and 
enjoying their ingenuous ignorance of his sense; — alto- 

raded a phase of human nature as you 
will find on the face of this sinful \v< .rid." The i: 

melancholy of moral abasements is declared by a Satur- 
day r to be that of a hoary and lecherous old 

man ; filth and obscenity are never SO unnaturally ii;ius- 

from the chattering lip and that totter- 

ing and toothless Satyr must be indeed far gonewho does 

not keep his foul life and conversation pretty closely to 
him hakspeare's exiled Duke in Arden hail a real 

kindness for cynical Jaques; but when Jaques prop 

to read the world a lecture upon .sin, the Dul.e denounced 



590 GRAYBEARD CORRUPTERS OF YOUTH. 

him to his face as one who himself had been a notorious 
libertine, 

" And all the embossed sores and headed evils 
That thou with licence of free foot hast caught, 
Wouldst thou disgorge into the general world." 

Evil minds change good to their own nature, says 
Shelley's Prometheus. There is one species of corrup- 
tion, as defined by Dr. T. Brown, which is exercised 
from a love of the corruption itself — a spirit of malicious 
proselytism, which forms the last dreadful stage of vice; 
when the grey-headed veteran of debaucheries that 
began in youth, and have been matured by a long life of 
excess in all that is gross and depraving, till he has 
acquired " a sort of oracular gravity of profligacy 
among gay profligates," collects around him his band 
of youthful disciples, and relates to them the tales of 
merriment of other years, as an excitement to present 
passions. " If there be a being on this earth whom it is 
permitted to us to hate with a full and absolute detesta- 
tion, it is surely a human demon like this. - " What a 
picture is that Swift has painted, of one whose nerves 

" cold drivelling Time has all unstrung, 

But left untouch'd his lechery of tongue ; 
His lechery of tongue, which still remains, 
And adds a friendly aid to want of brains." 

M. Taine's portrait of Wycherley, in his History of 
English Literature, is that of a toothless roisterer and a 
white-haired blackguard, stringing together dull obscen- 
ities, and dragging his spent body and enervated brain 
through the stages of misanthropy and libertinage ; a 
man who used his vigorous intelligence and real talents 
only to his own injury and the injury of others. John- 
son says of himself, in the case of Dryden, that he has 
no wish to conceal or excuse the depravity of the mind 
that can trade in corruption, and can deliberately pollute 



PROSELYTIZING OLD SATYRS. 591 

itself with ideal wickedness for the sake of spreading the 
contagion in society : such degradation of the dignity of 
genius, such abuse of superlative abilities, cannot be con- 
templated but with grief and indignation. Macaulay's 
portraiture of the elder Wharton is that of a man who 
" had his eye on every boy of quality who came of age," 
— nor was it easy for such a boy to resist the arts of a 
noble, eloquent, and wealthy flatterer, who united juve- 
nile vivacity to profound art and long experience of the 
gay world : it mattered not what the novice preferred, 
gallantry, or the dicebox, or the bottle ; Wharton "soon 
found out the master passion, offered sympathy, advice, 
and assistance, and, while seeming to be only the min- 
ister of his disciple's pleasure, made sure of his disciple's 
vote." For his chief service to the Whig party was 
notoriously that of bringing in recruits from the young 
aristocracy. There arc nasty Nestors who remind us of 
Shelley's lines — 

v lore was this — old age with its grey hair, 
And wrinkled legends of unworthy things." 

There is a Lieutenant-General impaled in Mr. Thack- 
eray's Book <>f Snobs, military department, who has 

bed old age and grey hairs without being in the 
t venerable, who tells filth)' garrison stories after 

dinner, and is Listened too, poor disreputable old crea- 
ture though he be. Another chapter of that plain- 

iken book expo 1 rtain "old wretch" of 

Captain, whose hobby it is to catch hold of some beard- 
ing stripling of fashion, and show him " life" in 
various and amiable and inaccessible quai 
the old brute I . . . H F to be quite 

a respectable memb ; but perhaps the only 

good action he ever did in his life is the involuntary one 

of giving an example to be avoided, and showing what 
an odious thing in the social picture is that figure of the 



592 VETERAN C0NTAM1NAT0RS OF YOUTH. 

debauched old man who passes through life rather a 
decorous Silenus." Brown the elder at a Club, again, has 
before his mind's eye the image of " Old Silenus with 
purple face and chalk-stone fingers, telling his foul old 
garrison legends over his gin-and-water. He is in the 
smoking-room every night ; and I feel that no one can 
get benefit from the society of that old man.-''' If 
vice loses half its danger in being coarse, vastly more 
dangerous than these gin-and-water drivellers and fusty 
figures is the Petronius type stigmatized by Cowper, — 

" Greybeard corrupter of our listening youth, 
To purge and skim away the filth of vice, 
That so refined it might the more entice." 

In a later poem Cowper brands the coarser type too, 
— " There is a prurience in the speech of some," etc., 
leading to the abhorrent apostrophe, addressed to those 
whom, he surmises, the heathen lawgivers of old would 
have driven forth from the resort of men, and shut up 
every satyr in his den : 

" Oh come not ye near innocence and truth, 
Ye worms that eat into the bud of youth ! 
Infectious as impure, your blighting power 
Taints in its rudiments the promised flower ; 
Its odour perished and its charming hue, 
Henceforth 'tis hateful, for it smells of you." 

Shakspeare's Parolles is with perfect justice denounced 

as " a very tainted fellow, and full of wickedness. 

" My son corrupts a well-derived nature 
With his inducement," 

indignantly complains the noble Countess in A IPs Well 
that Ends Well. 

In graphic outline one of the most ideal of our poets 
traces " a wretch who crept a vampire among men, in- 
fecting all with his own hideous ill.'" In the person of 
Blayney, one of the most realistic of our poets has 
depicted with almost revolting realism, a veteran, most 



CR ABBE'S BLAYNEY. 593 

////venerable, corrupter of the young ; who, from being a 
wealthy heir, has lapsed, collapsed, into a needy pander, 
to be seen shuffling through the town "to hunt a dinner 
and to beg a crown ; to tell an idle tale that boys may 
smile : — 

" To be the grey seducer, and entice 
Unbearded folly into acts of vice ; . . . 
He first inveigles youth to walk astray, 

\t prompts and soothes them in their fatal way. 
Then vindicates the deed, and makes the mind his prey. 
***** 

" Hear the poor demon when the young attend, 
And willing car to vile experience lend ; 
When he relates (with laughing, leering eye) 
The tale licentious, mix'd with blasphemy ; 
No genuine gladness his narrations cause, 
The frailest heart denies sincere applause ; 
And many a youth has turned him half-aside 
And latlgh'd aloud, the sign of shame to hide, 

u Blayney, no aid in his vile cause to lose, 

. prints, and a licentious muse; 
borrows every help from every art, 
To stir the passions and mislead the heart : 
• from the subject let us soon escape, 

:-s ugly s! 
imetO their crimes escape from satire 

Who shall describe what Bl 

Should then iders <>f this page who, not being 

rs of Crabbe, have never nut with Blayney before, 

henceforth they will remember him, perhaps, and, let us 

foutly, loathe him unutl 
him, and the like of him. To them may be said, on 
this last page, what a motto on the title ; meant 

/ in a very dit'i :!i "\v know 

the man and his communi HOW him by it, and 

hate him for it, as a mo communication; haply 

the worst of all th<>sr evil ones that poisonously infect 
healthy natures, and fatally corrupt good man: 



I X D E X. 



Abarbanel, 147. 

in, iSS. 

A 

Acquaintance and frier. 

42, 47, K 
309» 3U. 
414, 416, 480, 491, 539. 

2 3- 
I rrod, 63. 
Aikin, I 
Aiol de St Gilles, 108. 

I . 
A 

, 154. 
ireat, 212. 

' 2 7- 
Anne, I 

. .' " 

104. 
III. 

1 1 i. 
200, 206, 400. 



Bacon, Lord, 59, 3S6, 424, 556. 
Bagehot, W., 430. 

S., 210. 
Baillie, Joanna, 24, 60, 7: 
199, 263, 292, 342, 346, 4. : 
540, 5 s '- „ 

. II. de, 107, 252, 256, 44S, 

;• 
Bannockborn, 39. 
Barante, 

Hare re, 51, 212, 

I in the eve, 531 
Beanie, G., 127. 

-'45- 
Beaumont & Fletcher, 127, 276, 290, 

'. 406, 470, 
Beautiful in 

. 

. 

1 DOt able t'> 
I-'iiii 

i 
I 

. I . 1 \\. 

■ 



596 



INDEX. 



Boner, C, 462. 
Border enmities, 222 sq. 
Borromeo, Card., 158. 
Borrowing, a bondage, 249 sq. 
Boswell, J., 257, 287, 305, 313. 
Bottom the Weaver, 355. 
Boufflers, 405. 
Boyd, Dr., 6, 60, 302. 
Braddon, M. E., 57, 73, 79. 
Bronte, A., 57, 85, 204, 367, 585. 
Bronte, C, 25, 140, 363, 370, 400, 

57o. 
Bronte, E. , 463. 
Brooks, C. Shirley, 164, 167, 177, 

338. 
Brothers at strife, 216 sq. 
Brougham, Lord, 385, 430, 474, 

482. 
Broughton, Rhoda, 368, 373, 463. 
Brown, John, M.D., 12, 386, 397, 

398. 
Brown, Rob., 2. 
Brown, Dr. T., 9, 47, 124, 142, 

174,218, 317,326,333,343-350, 

490, 590. 
Browne, Sir T., 22, 144, 417, 501, 

538, 578. 
Browning, E. B., 84, 264, 317, 445, 

490, 544- 
Browning, Rob., 31, 114, 194,421, 

434, 559- 
Brunton, Mrs., 332. 
Brute life held in righteous regard, 

104 sq. 
Bruyere, La, 15, 56, 71, 76, 202, 

205, 282, 305, 309, 354, 399, 499, 

543- 
Buckle, H. T.,387, 553, 555- 
Bunyan, 236. 
Burghley, Lord, 96. 
Burke, E., 112, 317, 449, 520. 
Burnet, Bp., 286. 
Burney, F., 82. 
Burns, Rob., 32, 65, in, 150, 160, 

166, 259, 262, 289, 300, 305, 

306, 312, 368, 428, 460, 479, 

514, 538, 586. 
Butler, Bp., 204, 517. 
Butler, S., 77, 90, 206, 212, 221, 

244, 303, 386, 502. 
Buxton, C, 358. 
Byron, Lord, 23, 31, 57, 59, 61, 

148, 182, 223, 306, 334, 444, 

470, 476, 501, 530. 



C. 

Cain, 52. 

Caird, Dr. J., 468. 

Caligula, 454. 

Campbell, T., 244. 

Candour, Mrs., 176, 179. 

Canning, G., 357. 

Caracalla and Geta, 218 sq. 

Carafa, 53. 

Cardan, 473. 

Carew, 359, 361. 

Carlyle, T., 41, 152, 198, 203, 248, 

382 sq., 407, 413, 439, 488, 489, 

492, 507, 509, 511, 565. 
Caroline, Qu., 538. 
Carteret (Ld.- Granville), 562. 
Cartwright, W., 560. 
Castalio, 341. 
Casting bread upon the waters, 

485 sq. 
Casting pearls before swine, 518 sq. 
Catharine II. , 474, 483. 
Cato, 201, 206, 415, 582, 587. 
Caulaincourt, 195. 
Cellini, B., 208, 300, 529. 
Cervantes, 293, 436, 526, 563, 
Chalmers, Dr. T., 117, 397, 405, 

459- 
Chambers, R., 42, 114, 150, 339. 
Chamfort, 71. 
Channing, W. E., 330. 
Charles II., 253, 543. 
Charles VI., 522. 
Charles VII., 89. 
Charles Edw., Pr., 79. 
Chateaubriand, 137, 194, 297, 572. 
Chatter, 201 sq. 
Chaucer, 145, 163, 235, 325, 443, 

458. 
Chenier, M. J., 310. 
Chesapeake, 43. 
Chesterfield, Lord, 58, 71, 78, 162, 

282, 304, 309, 329, 379, 422, 

519, 530, 580. 
Chisholm, Mrs., 92. 
Choisy, 425. 
Churchill, C, 7, 58, 205, 384, 436, 

500, 537, 586. 
Cicero, 166, 182, 215, 218, 283, 

330, 470, 494. 
Civilis, 380. 
Clarendon, 253. 
Clarinda, 160. 
Claudian, 38. 
Clavius, 309. 



INDEX. 






: R., I IO. 

Clough. A. II., 248, 270, ;- 

1 . with dainties, 332 sq. 

Cobbett, .: 

Colani, 579. 

I Ige, 1 1 art' 

Coleridge, ;o6. 

Coleridge, Samuel Tavlur, 72, 12;. 

} 

Coler 

< 

' 

5'- 
140, 322. 
rt, 80. 

. J . I . . 1 1 
l , 25, 7 1, 299, 3 

44" 

5" 

1 

30a 

1 

I 






D. 






poise, \x\ 

453. 
I tan, 

. 

. Darkest just before, 

Deckc ; . 

■ 455- 

] )e Morgan, A., \ 

66. 

JJicke: 

Dinner <i| ! : 

• 349. 

Divinity t: . 

1 -< dining out, 496 vj. 

. 

• I ,r -- 559- 

I )<jnne, I U. . 

I . Jack of, I 

Drake, Sir F., 89. 

. 3 S 4, 534i 
I tagn< 

- 

I . 

: 

1 

I . 1 

I 

i 

1 S3- 

. 

; 



598 



INDEX. 



Evil communications, 577 sq. 
Expression, Facial, 363. 
Eye, The seeing, 382 sq. 
Eye with abeam, 531 sq. 
Eyed, One-, 385 sq. 
Eyes and no eyes, 388 sq. 

F. 

Fabrication, Sheer, 573 sq. 
Familiarity breeds contempt, 6 sq. 
Family fevtds, 224. 
Fare, La, 367, 381. 
Fatal prosperity, 44 sq. 
Fault-finding, 161 sq., 536. 
Feltham, O., 27, 159, 187, 245, 

284, 323> 324> 460. 
Fen el on, 536. 

Fielding, H., 85, 289, 500. 
Fight, A deadly, 458 sq. 
Fischweiler, 454. 
Flaxrnan, 476. 
Fleury, Cuv., 301. 
Follies of the wise, 470 sq. 
Fonblanque, A., 550. 
Fontaine, La, 2, 11, 120, 244,273, 

435, 504, 554- 
Fontenelle, 415. 
Forbes, Ed., 389. 
Forster, J., 407, 584. 
Foster, J., 123, 294. 
Fournier, 375. 
Francia, Dr., 152. 
Francis, Assisi, St., 478. 
Francis de Sales, St., 327. 
Francis II., 64. 
Francis, Sir Ph., 430. 
Francis Xavier, St., 324, 478. 
Fratricide, 216 sq. 
Frederick the Great, 181, 24S, 280, 

471, 473- 
Friend, The wounds of a, 314 sq. 
Friends, Fair-weather, 185 sq. 
Froude, J. A., 129, 316, 443, 469, 

478. 
Fuller, Margaret, 328. 



Galba, 561. 

Galiani, 478. 

Gait, J., 529. 

Garrick, D., 287, 311. 

Gaskell, Mrs., 107, 114, 132, 170, 

203, 390, 574- 
Gautier, Th., 122. 
Gay, 190, 202, 259, 282. 



George II., 382, 394. 
George III., 430, 530. 
George IV., 550. 
Germans, good haters, 424. 
Gibbon, 38, 47, 51, 63, 78, 93, 

154, 165, 217, 218, 221, 229, 310, 

349, 472, 482, 554, 556, 562, 576. 
Gilbert, W., 4.03. 
Gladstone, W. E., 560. 
Godwin, W., 211. 
Goethe, 5, 29, 246, 248, 302, 318, 

409, 429, 445, 462, 481, 504. 
Goldsmith, 72, 181, 202, 253, 279, 

460, 520, 537. 
Good haters, 421 sq. 
Gore, Mrs., 85, 321. 
Gover, 518. 
Graham, Sir J., 482. 
Grammont, Count, 200. 
Grass, Eaters of, 145 sq. 
Gratian, 47. 

Great expectations foiled, 557 sq. 
Greene, R., 271, 437. 
Gregory the Great, 507. 
Gresset, 175, 240, 287, 345, 358, 

389, 451, 580. 
Gronow, Capt., 18. 
Guilford, Lord-Keeper, 1 10. 
Guizot, 349, 480. 

H. 

Hailes, 322. 

Hale, SirM., 295. 

Haliburton, 406, 468. 

Hamilton, Archbp., 64. 

Hampden, J., 535. 

Hare, Julius C., 164, 400, 418, 476, 

490. 
Harley (Ld. Oxford), 426. 
Hartley, David, 385. 
Harvey, W., 452. 
Hate, A Time to, 419 sq. 
Hater, A Good, 421 sq. 
Havelock, Sir H., 552. 
Hawkesworth, Dr., 53. 
Hawley, General, 41. 
Hawthorne, N., 35, 218, 345, 358, 

433> 558. 
Haydon, B. R., 408. 
Hay ward, A., 183, 338, 368. 
Hazlitt, W., 164, 246, 251, 255, 

321, 409, 423, 477, 510, 576. 
Head, Sir F., 109. 
Heart's own Secret of Bitterness, 

The, 136 sq. 



INDEX. 



599 



Heart responsive to Heart, ; : 
Heart-sickness of Hope Deferred, 

i 2 | sq. 
Heaviness for a Night, 29 sq. 
Heine, H., 423. 

115, ' -• '7--J 1 . 300, 30; 
457- 5". 53* 
Herbert, Geo., 56, 95. 255 
410. 

.ell, Sir J., 213. 

;al parallel . "" 

I I 

;2 7- 

\ I. 152, 
182, : :. J47i 4'3- 
Homely iare relished as a change, 

'■ 392, 393, 442, 

comb, loathed, 331. 

'•• '74, jio. 393.40S, 4'3» 
445- 

I \, 340, 440, 443, 

I 
I 

M'lr. d', 

Hondii . 

Humboldt, A., 2. 
Home, I>.. 350. 
Hunt, I .11 

Hunter, W. . 



I 
i 

Inchl 

I .1 

l 

l 



J. 
Jackson, 137. 
James, J. A., 450. 
lean Paul, see Kichter. 

M. 

Jerrold, !>.. ;i. 254, 560. 

I Johnians (Cantab.) ill A.D. 1 550, 

154- 
Johnson, Dr., 14. 202, 249, 256. 

3°5, 309. 3'-- ; 
472, 501, 502, 5 

, 73 . 1 : . 2 I 

200, 416. 
Ionian. 405. 

h [I., 339- 
Julian, Emperor, 472. 

"Juvenal, 24, 83, 84, 223, 4*>7i 5 02> 

5i°. 533- 



Keble, 136. 

Kemble, I . 

Kendall, G. W., 

King .5, 209, 

3°5- 
Kirby, W., 170. 

Kirwan, K., 171. 
Know! . J. S., 
Kntusofij 195. 

L 

Lam - 

. 

i 

I. an: 

I 
I . I 

I \ . 

i 
I 
! 

, 1 ' I 

I I 

, 1 17 

I . 1 

! 
I 

: • 177. 



6oo 



INDEX. 



Lewis XIV., 65, 246, 415, 550. 

Liars, Always, 564 sq. 

Liscov, 287. 

Livy, II. 

Locke, J., 76, 169, 525. 

Long, G., 349. 

Longfellow, H. W., 314. 

Lonsdale, Bp., 480. 

Loughborough, Lord, 483. 

Lowell, J. R., 206, 343. 

Lucian, 189. 

Luther, 234, 424, 472, 478. 

Luttrell, EL, 364, 414. 

Lysons, S., 180. 

Lytton, Edward Lord, 4, 6, 25, 28, 
52, 79, 100, 103, 130, 132, 136, 
181, 197, 220, 227, 235, 255, 348, 
388, 393, 421, 426, 447, 481, 489, 
499, 5i6, 561, 587, 588. 

Lytton, Robert Lord, 48, 54, 61, 
66, 249, 298, 352, 382, 491, 492, 
523, 587. 

M. 

Mabillon, 168, 307. 

Macaulay, Lord, 13, 14, 16, 23, 
44, 51, 163, 171, 196, 202, 211, 
222, 224, 227, 280, 356, 424, 426, 
43°, 47i, 530> 536, 553, 567, 57o, 
59i. 

Mackenzie, EL, 288, 314. 

Mackintosh, Sir J., 30,421. 

Maginn, W., 355. 

Mahony, F., 148, 297. 

Maine, Duchesse du, 27. 

Maintenon, Mde. de, 82. 

Maistre, J. de, 452. 

Malebranche, 168. 

Maledictory valediction, 61 sq. 

Malevolent gesticulation, 54 sq. 

Malherbe, 459. 

Mammon worship, 509 sq. 

Marat, 50. 

March, Lord, 183. 

Marchegay, 108. 

Marivaux, 163. 

Marlborough, Duchess of, 427. 

Marmontel, 583. 

Marplot, 273. 

Marryat, 125, 275, 381. 

Marsh, 6. 

Martial, 409. 

Martin, Th., 29, 288. 

Martineau, EL, 323. 

Mary Tudor, 128. 



Masaniello, 49. 

Massinger, 196, 265, 285. 

Masson, D., 300. 

Maule, Justice, 135. 

Maxima debetur fiueris reverentia, 

586 sq. 
Meade, Dr., 168. 
Meddler's mischance, 273 sq. 
Melville, Herm., 453. 
Merivale, C, 78. 

Michelet, 217, 225, 299, 365, 512. 
Mill, John S., 118, 210, 214, 386. 
Milman, H. EL, 226, 269, 430. 
Milton, 28, 77, 144, 414, 442, 472, 

521, 536. 
Mirabeau, 383, 475. 
Mitford, M. R., 428. 
Mole, Count, 482. 
Moliere, 89, 177, 199, 255, 267, 

274, 320, 334, 356, 366, 410, 422, 

471, 484, 525, 567. 
Montagu, Lady M. W., 366, 401, 

566. 
Montague, C, 44. 
Montaigne, 245, 299, 339, 475, 524, 

544- 
Montesquieu, 90, 201, 390, 415, 

451- 
Moore, Dr. E., 52, 66. 
Moore, T., 179, 279, 306, 336, 370. 
More, Hannah, 235, 311. 
More, Sir T., 20. 
Morier, J., 498. 
Morris, Humphrey, 1 13. 
Morton, T., 31 1. 
Motley, J. L., 39, 89, 230, 294, 

379, 425, 475- 
Mounier, 575. 
Mure, Col, 556. 
Murray, Regent, 64. 
Mute malice, 55 sq. 
Mystics, 491. 

N. 
Nabal, 159. 
Nagging, 242. 
Napier, John, 473. 
Napoleon L, 165, 397, 460, 572. 
Nebuchadnezzar and grass, 145 sq. 
Necker, 308. 
Nero, 49, 51. 
New, Nothing, under the Sun, 373 

sq. 
Newman, J. H., 548. 
Newton, J., 512. 



INDEX. 



60 1 



Niagara, 9. 

>f, 476 sq. 
3 )0. 



Titus 570. 
Odiln-: f!, 226 sq. 

Oliphant, Mrs., 267, 396, 39S, 530. 

Olive.-. ; .. I .. 

One fault, 480 sq. 
.•09. 
1 cli of Nature, 341 sq. 

Or.sini, Pri: 

Overbuy, Sir T.. 366, 
Overruling Providence, 
. 1 86, 193, 196, 501. 



Pain, Liking to give, 321 sq. 
Palme: . 37 1. 

Papal curse, 268 sq. 
I . 299. 

Parallels, Historical, 378 sq. 
507. 

1 Fair, 3 5 

1 J7 1 - 

Patrick, Bp., 207. 
Paul I 

1 ; . .. . 
Paasao 

and Swm . i 

v. .. 171. 

1 

! 

1 480. 

! .!..;.[ ;'•■, r 2. 3/ 

I 

Philip 

Plain Living and aking, 



Plantns, 1S7, 533. 
Pliny, 245. 

Plutarch, 46. 113. 153, 212, 415, 
451, 505. 550. 

. - 
. and Nature, 351 sq. 

53, 14.1, 177, 309, 311, 
314, 31 S, 484, 537. 

333- 

• 4 S 4- 
Portia, 70. 
Practical jol 

Praise, Self-best 

. 
Prior. M.. 
Pn.cier, B. W.. 35, 

e( in his own country, 5. 
■ 

' Proverb of the ancients, The,' 21. 
Pugin, Welby, 260. 
Pulse diet, 143 sq. 
Pyrrhu 
Pythagoras, 522. 

Q. 

Queensberry, Duke of, 114. 
Quillinan, 1 . 

; r , 306, 

k. 

! . 50. 

I 

Rawlii 

■ 

■ 

i . I 

: i 

■ ; iq, 

I 
Kichc 



602 



INDEX. 



Richter, Jean Paul F., 241, 398, 

454, 543- 
Riddell, Mrs., 74, 141. 
Rienzi, 48. 
Rigby, Col., 41. 
Riley, John, 543. 
Robert, Leopold, 258. 
Robertson, F. W., 327, 489. 
Robespierre, 50, 67 sq., 211. 
Robinson, H. C, 3, 94, 305, 476. 
Rochefoucauld, La, 291, 416. 
Rogers, S., 220, 321, 323, 390. 
Romilly, Sir S., 575. 
Roqueplan, N. , 392. 
Roscoe, W. C. , 544. 
Rousseau, J. J., 45, 231, 246, 259, 

361, 416, 425, 443, 569. 
Russell, Admiral, 163. 
Rutebeuf, 284. 



Saint Evremond, 478. 
Saint Marc-Girardin, 232. 
Saint Pierre, B. de, 119. 
Saint Simon, Duke of, 27, 80. 
Sainte Beuve, C. A., 246, 292, 308, 

358, 416, 425. 
Samson, Abbot, 384. 
Sand, G., 82, 511. 
Sanderson, Bp., 325. 
Sated with superfluities, 331 sq. 
Saturday Review, 14, 60, 93, 171, 

230, 269, 297, 323, 378, 471, 528, 

540, 563, 589. 
Saul among the prophets, I sq. 
Saul of Tarsus, I. 
Savage, M. W., 563. 
Scarron, 451. 
ScharKng, H., 347. 
Scheraeus, 236. 
Schiller, 3, 75, 140, 184, 193, 216, 

299, 357, 469- 
Schimmelpenninck, M. A., 150, 162, 

166. 
Schlegel, A. W. , 288. 
Scott, John, 553. 
Scott, Sir Walter, 22, 26, 31, 32, 

55, 85,91,92, 105, 106, 115, 152, 

178, 180, 231, 290, 333, 347, 371, 

406, 414, 423, 437, 444, 470, 497, 

517, 522, 525, 55i, 559, 585. 
Scribe, E., 76. 
Secrets blabbed, 69 sq. 
Segur, 336. 
Selden, J., 476, 499. 



Seneca, 210, 466, 480, 501, 582. 

Senior, W. N., 212. 

Sentence Passed, Execution De- 
layed, 465 sq. 

Servants and upstairs' secrets, 82 sq. 

Sevigne, Mde. de, 573. 

Sevigne, Mile, de, 367. 

Shaftesbury, 3, 24, 228, 303, 335. 

Shakspeare, 10, 16, 22, 30, 31, 33, 
44, 5 6 , 57, 70, 75, §3, 9h "2, 

l6o, 185, 190, 191, 199, 2CI, 2l6, 
217, 233, 237, 242, 243, 249, 250, 
262, 271, 272, 286, 299, 302, 309, 

319, 34i, 344, 347, 360, 399, 4°o, 
401, 410, 411, 412, 439, 440, 441, 
442, 465, 467, 484, 485, 502, 503, 
504,505,507,510,513,514,519, 

525, 5 2 6, 532, 533, 542, 55o, 57i, 

581, 587, 589, 590, 592. 
Sharp, W., 473. 
Shelley, P. B., 141, 267, 268, 332, 

349, 398,445, 5°7, 5io, 590, 59i. 
Shenstone, 149, 259, 270, 353, 480. 
Sheridan, R. B., 72, 176, 179, 242, 

279, 310, 484, 569. 
Shirley, 372. 

Shouted out of the World, 61 sq. 
Short-sighted, 395. 
Shrews and Scolds, 233 sq. 
Sic vos 11011 vobis, 547 sq. 
Silence, politic, 196 sq. 
Silvester, Bern., 106. 
Singing out of season, 261 sq. 
Sismondi, 191. 
Sixtus V., 64. 
Skin-deep beauty, 366 sq. 
Skinner, Bp., 150. 
Sleepless, 434 sq. 
Smith, Adam, 164, 222, 296, 305, 

539, 549, 571. 
Smith, Albert, 278. 
Smith, Alex., 252. 
Smith, Sydney, 18, 213, 288, 320, 

329, 410, 421, 479, 553. 
Smith, T. Assheton, 113. 
Smith, Wm., 392. 
Smollett, 239, 277. 
Socrates, 232, 459, 475, 528- 
Sophocles, 254, 357, 578. 
Soporifics, 452 sq. 
Soulie, F., 24, 105, 321, 589. 
Soult, 43. 
South, Dr. R., 7, 11, 27, 159, 175, 

286, 316, 326, 374, 391, 495, 50b, 

578, 583- 



7.YDEX. 



6o- 



Southc. J5, 109, no. 121, 


Theological rancour, 226 sq. 




Th<>: 


496, 560. s 


Thrale, Mrs., 1 


S 


Thnriow, Lord, 430. 


Spencer, Herbert, 92, 335, 366. 


Tobin, 203. 502. 


. 1 2 >. 132, 143. 145. 216, 


[neville, A. de, 302. 


504. 


. : . 


Spin 


Topla 230. 


ve mischief, 277 sq. 








~ing the circle, 526. 


. 






J 1 1. 


Trench, Archbp.. ;. 11. 22 


Stanhope, Earl, 4 ; 


466. 


1 


Trench. M: . 460. 




Triumph, Over-! 


Stephen. Sir J., 228, 3 J! 


Trollope, Anthony, 3;, S4, 10 r. 










if. K, 263, 36S, 3S5, 


Truni; 




Tytler, S. A., 


5 sq. 


U. 


Superannuated steed, 109 sq. 


Urban VI., 53. 


- ! iip, 94 sq. 






Y. 


- 


Vanessa, 12 s . 




Vain 451. 






5. 540, 551 


' 


59a 


Veuill . 431' 


Swmbarne, A. ( .. 


Vict* 




Villehardouin, 344. 




Villemain, 




\'il!<>!:. 


T. 


2 


'. 


' 


•n, 590. 




1 folly in tl. 








'. 




1 






w. 




' 




49a 


. 




' 






. . . ■ ' 






• 554- 


290, 1 


■ 


1 






-1 




. 1 i ; ' 










604 



INDEX. 



Wesley, John, 19, 230, 237, 404, 

515, 529- 
"Wharton, Duke of, 534. 
Wharton, Lord, 570, 591. 
Whately, Archbp., 9, 59, 167, 351, 

526, 532, 580. 
Whispered-away friendships, I73sq. 
William the Silent, 380, 475. 
Williams, Rowland, 244. 
Wilson, Alex., 170. 
Wilson, John, 1 17, 312, 408, 479. 
Windham, W., 1 19, 537, 541. 
Wither, G. , 293. 
Wives, Scolding, 232 sq. 
Wolcot, Dr., 14, 355. 
Wolff, Dr., 431. 
Wood, Anthony a, 41, 169. 
Wordsworth, Mrs., 363. 
Wordsworth, Win., 3, 68, 129, 130, 

137, 148, 149, 162, 205, 263, 304, 



311, 343,3Si»372,388,457,486, 

492, 560, 561, 564. 
Wotton, Sir H., 360. 
Wycherley, 590. 

X. 

Xantippe, 232 sq. 

Xavier, St. Fras., 324, 478. 

Y. 

Yeh, Commissioner, 567. 
Young, 317, 359, 413, 442, 460. 
Youth, Promise of, fallacious, 557 

sq. 
Youth, Veteran corrupters of, 581 

sq. 



Zeluco, 66. 
Zeno, 153. 



Z. 









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